22368-AikensLake-2021-US

FISHING REPORT If you weren’t there or you haven’t heard, fishing on Aikens Lake is outstanding. Here are Aikens Lake’s largest recorded fish by species in 2020: • 30” WALLEYE caught by Mr. Calem Anderson of Dugald, MB. • 42” NORTHERN PIKE caught by Mr. Asher Leitch of East St. Paul, MB. • 40.25” LAKE TROUT caught by Mr. Dave Fairbairn of Creighton, SK. • 19.5” SUCKER caught by Mr. Ryan Kiansky of Steinbach, MB. • 30” BURBOT caught by Mr. Kieran Anderson of Dugald, MB. While many would have loved to have been fishing at Aikens Lake in 2020, the borders didn’t allow for that to happen. That said, we were pleased to offer our world-class experience to our faithful local guests. With the lowered number of anglers (and pressure) on the lake throughout the season, many great fish were boated. Here are 2020’s best catches: Kudos to these happy campers that wrangled these beasts from the deep. This is but a small sample size of the bounty caught in 2020. Steady warm weather and low water levels compressed our quarry into massive pods of hungry, glutinous wolf packs. However, with reduced angling pressure the fish should be even more ravenous in 2021. Congratulations to our happy fishermen! We want to send out a HUGE SHOUTOUT to all our Manitoba guests who supported us this summer. The Big Guy, Gerry Turenne, had a great saying that we kept repeating in our heads this spring: “Take the step, and the bridge will appear”. We flew up to the lodge with only a small number of trips booked by Manitobans to start but ended up booking more than 5x that number by the end of the season! We are SO grateful to all our Manitoba guests. We had one customer, Nick Leitch, who booked three separate trips to Aikens in 2020. We had many more who did two trips each. We had a lot of new groups of Manitobans who were either looking to explore their own province and/or support local business. We are so thankful they decided that 2020 was the year to finally try that fly-in trip they had always thought about. We made many new friends, and by the sounds of it they will all be back in 2021, and 2022, and well, you know how it goes once you have been to Aikens… We also want to send out another HUGE SHOUTOUT to all our guests who could not travel to see us this summer due to restrictions that prevented them from coming up to Aikens. We love you guys! We can’t express how much our “Aikens Family” means to us, and our guests make up a significant part of that family. We promise that the red carpet is going to be rolled out once everyone can make it back to Aikens Lake… we cannot wait to see everyone again. In the end, we are grateful to everyone (aka the “Aikens Family”) for working together and helping us put on the 2020 season. This year will be remembered fondly for the simple fact that despite the biggest challenges the tourism industry had, everyone came together to make sure that we could operate and provide the experiences that have become our signature. So, thank you to our local guests who were able to book and visit, thank you to all our wonderful guests in the USA, Eastern Canada, and in the prairies who were so accommodating in rebooking their stay with us in 2021. Thank you to our staff, they all worked so diligently to provide an Aikens Experience that was incredible despite the circumstances. Thank you to Bluewater Aviation and their ace pilots who shuttled people and supplies all summer and kept us going. Thank you to our volunteers for being so understanding. Thank you to the Canadian and Manitoban governments for the great programs put in place that allowed us to open and operate in 2020. Thank you to our families and friends who took care of the kids and did whatever else was asked when we were out working to put things together in a hurry. They say it takes a village – well for us it takes the “Aikens Family”. Thanks for being a part of this chapter, and we can’t wait to write many more stories in this book with all of you.