I have what is becoming a bit of a traditional 4 day / 3 night fall fishing trip to go muskie fishing on Sturgeon Lake. The first two days a friend and his two young sons join me and as they leave on the afternoon of the second day, my adult son and son-in-law join me for the remainder of the trip. For the purposes of this review it is important to realize that this is a trip that we very much look forward to all year.
The cabins that we stayed in were 2 bedroom cottages for the first couple of years and for the last couple of years we had a 3 bedroom cabin. The cabins are old and have not been updated or renovated at all from what I can tell. They cabins were kept clean on the surface but don’t look too close. For example, the shower was not something we were comfortable using – nobody in our group did. The barbeque they provided was literally unusable so if you do want to barbeque, to be safe I would bring your own. The cabins each have a small gas furnace heater. The first year we couldn’t get to keep working. We ran out to Canadian tire an purchased a small electric heater and we now always bring that along now as back up. However, given that we were “guys” on a fishing trip for just a few days, we easily overlooked the not so positive things about the cabin. It was perfectly fine for our purposes, we had a wonderful time, and really we spent most of our time out on the water fishing. We bring our own boat, so a great advantage at Lunge Haven is that they have a ramp to launch our boat, very good docking and sell gas at the dock. These were the main reasons we selected this location – this was a great convenience for us not having to launch the boat at a marina or go looking for gas elsewhere.
This year however there was a big problem. As always, our group coordinated a date, booked our vacation days at work, and then made our reservations with Lunge Haven months in advance. Once it is booked the excitement for this trip builds intensely for our group. Then out of the blue, exactly 7 days prior to the trip I received a call from Lunge Haven saying that “the owner had decided to do some renovations and we had to cancel our reservation”. I questioned this given that, as I mentioned above, it doesn’t look like they had ever done any renovations before, but was offered no detail as to exactly what was wrong or going to be done. They just insisted that I cancel my reservations. This seemed very odd given the general condition of the cabins all these years. Why couldn’t they wait another week and honour our reservation?? This left us all disappointed and scrambling to try to find somewhere else to stay or else we would have to just cancel our fishing trip all together.
Then just three days before our original reservation date, Lunge Haven called me and guess what ... they said that “they changed their mind and would now wait to do their renovation until later”. “ They would like me to come and stay after all”. Really? What is actually going on here? In any event, I told them I would not be coming back anymore as I couldn’t trust them any longer.
If you are considering staying here, I would recommend visiting the facility beforehand if that is at all possible for you. And just keep in mind that they could, and they would, cancel your vacation with very short notice if it suits them.