This was my dad's and my first trip together at Sylvania. This was my dad's first time back since he went one time in the 1970's. We stayed at Bobcat on High Lake for two nights. We put in at the Crooked Lake launch and made the short portage to High Lake. There was a thunderstorm blowing in which thankfully passed us by for the most part. The sun came out during the rain and produced a double rainbow the ends of which could be seen appearing to come right up out of the lake. The mosquitos were horrible the entire trip, and I had well over 100 bites on just my arms alone. Bobcat proved to be a decent site. The only thing that really bothered me aobut the site (other than the bugs) was hearing a large tree fall nearby each night.
High Lake is extremely deep, and the bottom drops off very quickly from the shoreline. We caught quite a few smallmouth bass by dragging dark green soft plastics on a jig across the bottom. The bass were all deep during mid-day. High Lake is very clear, and I could not see the bottom where we were catching bass during mid-day so they were pretty deep. The bite was really good around 5 PM, and the bass seemed to be cruising right up by the shoreline and shallow areas for food at that time. We fished the north side east of the portage to Crooked Lake all the way down the east side to the south and caught the most fish prior to passing the big island.
We took the opportunity to fish West Bear Lake which produced some small largemouth bass. The portage near and around Kerr Lake was swarming with mosquitos. I have taken to renaming Kerr Lake to Mosquito Lake. We checked out the only campsite on West Bear Lake, Coyote, which is, what I would consider, a five star site.
High Lake is a great lake for anyone looking for a private lake without a long portage. There are only two campsites on High Lake and they are not near each other which is not typical of most sites in Sylvania.
Other than the bugs, the trip was amazing.
