When the Department of Lands and Forests workers stocked Pigeon Lake with 50,000 walleye in 1925, they couldn’t have known the impact they would have 100 years later. Those fry joined 750,000 introduced during the previous three years and became the most popular drive-to fishery in Ontario.
Walleye really took off after extensive stocking on all the Kawartha lakes during the ‘40s, with almost 4.5 million fry introduced to Pigeon Lake alone. The populations expanded at the same time as cars became affordable and newly built highways made travel to the Kawarthas easy.
Larry Jones was one of those visitors. Though he grew up on Toronto Island, as a 10-year old, he would come to fish for bass and muskie with his dad before moving to Bobcaygeon permanently. Anglers and hunters may recognize him as the force behind Larry’s Taxidermy in Dunsford, an operation he ran for decades before retiring in 2020, and which gave him a unique perspective on the fishery.
“The fishing was always good at the opener and throughout the season, and often it was great,” he recalled. “You always knew you would get a limit, it was only a question of how long it took.”
Dar Kimble Sr., who ran a bait shop in Bobcaygeon, would fire a shotgun to announce that the season had begun. Occasionally, the shot would ring out an hour or two before it was actually midnight.
Jones went on to say that the fishing was so good that it was shoulder to shoulder on shore, and gunwale to gunwale on the water below the Bobcaygeon dam. “If you were in a boat and needed something from shore, the fastest way to land was to hop from boat to boat.”
Originally published in the Ontario Out of Doors Fishing Annual 2026
