About a week ago I took a trip up to Springwood Cottages with a few friends. We planned this trip perfectly for the opening of bass season here in Ontario and wanted to visit a lake that wouldn’t see much boat traffic. Opening season on some lakes near Toronto can be brutal in terms of the number of anglers on the water. Since Springwood is about 4 hours from Toronto is was both close enough and far enough to provide good fishing and low angling pressure. On top of that Springwoods cottages and services were both top notch, I was so pleased that I decided to review them, which makes this the first cottage review we’ve ever posted.
Springwood Cottages is a beautiful cottage resort open all year, owned and maintained by Cezar Spirala, located on Kennebec Lake in the Land O’ Lakes region of Ontario (near Napanee about 4 hours from Toronto). There are several cottages spotted around this beautiful piece of Canadian Shield land and each is very well maintained and clean. Each cottage also has its own personality and extra amenities, some of which can get pretty luxurious including things like flat screen tv’s and jacuzzi. The decks surrounding the cottages were also in tip-top condition. The area is nicely landscaped and the staff are young, energetic and very friendly.
John Marshe and I headed out to a small lake about 3 hours from Toronto, it’s one of John’s favorite spots to fish. The lake was comprised of several canals chained together, and the structure and vegitation could change drasticly from channel to channel. The rocky channels seemed to be the most productive and held a great deal of fish, whereas most of the weedy channels seemed to be so weedy and shallow that we couldn’t find even a single bucket mouth anywhere near the slop. Our intentions were to fish for musky, but after an hour or so of no success we decided to switch things up and target smallmouth instead. We caught quite a few in the 1-2 pound range and even spotted some 3-4 pounders cruising in the deep weeds.
John Marshe works with MeegsOnline, “Ontario’s Most Favorite Jig”, and a is frequent contributor to OFN.
Thanks again for taking me out on your boat and sharing with me some of your secret fishing spots and tactics.
The weather has been extremely hot since Gillian and I moved to London, Ontario. In our little, un-air conditioned apartment, life was rather miserable for about 48 hours. We stayed at my sisters house to escape the heat, which was nice, but it meant fishing was out of the question, since there was nowhere within walking distance to go. Yesterday evening was the perfect day for us to head out to the river and find some fish. Thanks to some helpful tips from our readers I knew there the river holds several species of fish, and I had a basic idea where to start searching.
Within the first few minutes of fishing I had a short strike from a fair sized bass. I used a small #3 Mepps spinner bait to coerce a nice little smallmouth bass minutes later. The little guy put up a great fight as all river bass seem to do. At first glance the fish looked nice and healthy with a good sized belly. As I removed the hook I noticed that the fishes mouth was badly damaged and one of its eyes were missing, perhaps the result of a foul hook or an attack from another fish. On the next cast, I hooked another fish, this time a small rockbass, We headed up river for a few minutes before calling it a day. Hopefully our next visit will produce some larger fish.
Gillian and I decided to take a quick trip to the Belleville, Ontario to do some shore fishing in the Bay of Quinte with a couple friends. Very windy conditions and heavy boat traffic made locating walleye and bass very difficult. We ended up targeting small pan fish. We caught a variety of fish, including rock bass, sunfish, bluegill and for the first time I caught a goby. The goby is an invasive species that can be found throughout the great lakes. They take over prime spawning sites traditionally used by native species, competing with native fish for habitat and changing the balance of the ecosystem.
We fished well into the darkness and my friends landed a couple nice bass and a big crappie before we packed up and headed home for a few beers.
Since musky season opened on the first Saturday of June, Team Fury has been hard at work each weekend chasing the fish of ten thousand casts. Contrary to past musky trips, locating fish was extremely difficult. We targeted musky on Lake Scugog which is located about an hour from Toronto, Ontario. While Scugog is very close to the largest city in Canada, it hold a surprisingly high number of musky, most of which average 30-35 inches in length.
Each of our visits to Scugog fell on inconsistent weather patterns. We found ourselves in the middle severe cold fronts on our first two visits, and ideal weather on our third visit. Despite the good weather we were only able to coax one small musky to follow our bait. The fourth visit again had ideal weather. This time I set out with our friend Bill who had put me on numerous musky last summer. I felt good about the weather conditions and I knew Bill’s wealth of knowledge chasing Scugog muskies would make the trip a success.
We headed out at 1am in grand Fury style and got to the launch well before sunrise. Since we were early we decided to get a couple hours sleep before we launched the boat at sunrise. We awoke a few hours later, missing the sunrise all together. We quickly got the boat in the water, hoping to make up for lost time. There were already several boats on the water, which was expected since this was the first day of bass season in the region. While the bass fishermen hugged the shallow shorelines looking for largemouth bass, we drifted in deeper water throwing baits for musky.
There wasn’t much excitement for the first hour or two and then I finally hooked into my first musky of the year, a 30 incher caught on one of my baits I had made the week before. Not long after I set the hook into something with some weight on it, and hauled in my first legal sized fish of the year which measure just under 37 inches in length. With two musky in the boat, Bill figured it was now his turn to get some action and pulled in a beautiful 19 inch largemouth bass.
To catch such octopus, one employs a special tackle comprising a hooked, weighted wooden board about eight inches in length, to which a crab is tied, upside-down. Octopi apparently have a great weakness for crab, particularly those with their vulnerable underbelly exposed to attack. The baited device is lowered into the water using a thick nylon/polyester line, and then jigged up-and-down by hand on the seafloor. Octopus usually feel the bait with their tentacles before launching themselves onto it, and this can be felt in one's hands as a sort of 'sticking' feeling.
