No matter how many questions you ask before going to a new place, there’s a simple fact -- you don’t know what you don’t know. I did some homework prior to our recent first visit to Ballard’s Black Island Lodge on Lake of the Woods. The trip was terrific but Here are a few things I will do differently next time so there are not hitches and you won’t get a stitch in your britches.

After lodge owner Gary Moeller had a really great trip to Anglers Inn last April, he invited us up to fish the waters of Ontario’s Lake of the Woods, at Ballard’s Black Island Lodge. Finally, Half Past First Cast was going NORTH of the border. Our goal was to catch a new Grand Slam – walleye, musky, smallmouth and northern pike in a single day.

We were unsure of what we’d experience on our Lake of the Woods smallmouth trip, but the quality of the fish exceeded any possible expectations. We had no idea we’d run across so many big specimens, but on each of the last two days it took nearly a 20-inch minimum to crack our collective top five. Here’s the photo proof.