I was not a fisherman before starting this adventure. I did a fair amount of fishing when I was a kid, but I’d let go of the pastime many years ago. I wanted it back and traveled up to
Mattawa,
Ontario to find it.
It was back in 2010
that I first discovered the awesome ATV trails in Mattawa. On that trip we happened upon a basically deserted lake on the side of one of the trails, which is what pushed me to call my contact in Mattawa with the idea of using UTVs to reach some remote fishing locations there. He liked the idea and was, in fact, already discussing Brook Trout fishing with the guys from
The New Fly Fisher TV show and we decided to join forces and team up for a fishing trip to remember.
Tasked with securing vehicles for the trip, I looked up the local Mattawa powersports dealer,
Mattawa Sports & Marine, and noticed it was a dealer for
CFMOTO Canada. Since I’d never been in a CFMOTO vehicle and we could ride from the dealer right to the trail, I called up CFMOTO Canada and arranged for three UTVs – One
UFORCE 800 Utility UTV and two sportier
ZFORCE 800EX UTVs.
My cameraman picked me up early on Monday morning and we headed north from Toronto towards Mattawa. The trip is all on major roads and once you get out of Toronto, traffic is a distant memory. We headed up Hwy. 400 to Hwy. 11, which we took to North Bay. From there, we headed east on Hwy. 17 right into Mattawa. In about 3.5 hours, we arrived at
Mattawa Adventure Camp, which was our home base for this fishing/UTV riding adventure.