Taking full advantage of our Government's recently relaxed social distancing restrictions and expansion of family bubbles, French and I loaded up his 2017 Argo Huntmaster for a day trouting. We headed out over the highway West to Whitbourne our destination: Highwaters.

French recently installed an Argo Accessory outboard motor bracket and a brand new Yamaha 2.5HP long shaft outboard. This compact four stroke unit is fantastic, it has an onboard fuel tank so no fuel can or hose is necessary.

Argos will propel themselves on OEM Argo tires which Mark has and we've done in the past. It's slow and logs a lot of wear hours on the machine as your only travelling at about 3-4km/h while the drive train is running at top speed. That's a nice bit of extra wear and tear on the engine, transmission, chains and bearings if you plan to travel a lot on water.

The small outboard is quieter, faster, burns a lot less fuel and saves the driveline of the Argo from extra hours wear and tear.

We headed in the old power line ATV trail and hopped into the water with ease.

I sat in front and piloted the machine off land and into water paddling with tires until water was deep enough for the outboard. French then took over operations from the back seat.

We motored into the same gully where we went ice fishing back in February and we were not disappointed as we hooked trout after trout.

Even though fishing was great at this location, we wanted to try out as many gullies as we could throughout the day. We went from one spot to the next and the fishing just got better and better!

We had such a great time that we never even took a break for a boil-up. The 2.5 outboard propelled the machine perfectly for trolling too which allowed us to cover a lot of water.

The last place we tried today was at the top of Goose Pond just off shore from our fire pit clearing where we've done a lot of ice fishing over the years.

Once again we were not disappointed, we caught quite a few trout before eventually packing up around 7:30pm. All in all between the two of us we caught at least 30-40 trout. We put most of them back keeping only 9 between the two of us for a meal. Neither of us are big on having a freezer full of fish, a fresh meal here and there and the pure enjoyment of catching them is what we enjoy.

Once we got back to the truck we decided to finally have a boil-up before hitting the highway. It had been a long day with no breaks and we were starved. I broke out my trusty GSI Pincacle stove & the pot from my GSI Dualist Kit and started frying up a couple onions.

Next we added a large bottle of French's homemade bottled moose to the mix.

After simmering for about fifteen minutes we dug in and enjoyed a fantastic feed!

Even with a traffic jam at the Holyrood detour (due to highway repairs) it was still a perfect day on the water, one of the best and most successful days trouting we've had in a long time.

The following morning I heated up the frying pan and fried up a fine feed of fresh trout for Boomer and I.

Cheers, MIKE

Copyright © 2025 Michael Smith