After a winter warming trend a few friends and I woke up early to travel east and fish some Lake Ontario tributaries. The morning’s temperatures were very low and the bitter wind froze up our guides and fingers. Once the clouds broke and the sun came out it wasn’t long until we discovered the pattern and areas where the steelhead were hiding.
* Updated March 6th with 25 new photos!
* Updated March 12th with 2 new photos!
* Updated March 19th with 16 new photos!
Hooked up with Dave and Rade out in Cobourg to search for some steelhead. The recent warm weather and precipitation have made for some amazing conditions. Just as first light started to creep over the horizon Rade was already hooked in to a fish and Dave soon after. Dave and Rade landed several more before the fish started becoming inactive. We took a walk downstream to look for other pools and caught a few smaller fish, but nothing noteworthy. We snuck back to our original spot, staying low for extra stealth, where we deployed beads and other single egg imitations triggering the action again and landing several more fish before heading back to the city.
Since Clive’s return to Ontario we planned out several consecutive trips up north in search of beefy largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, and of course, musky. The images in this gallery are spread out across several weeks where we battled the rain and the cold to identify key habitats during the cooling months. The fish were beginning to feed heavily before the long winter but our presentations had to be extremely slow. We focused on large baits that worked off the bottom and we managed to pull in several bass in the 2-3 pound range with the biggest (and now my personal best) at 5 pounds and 23″ long!
Update! We’ve added more fall fishing photos from Niagara River, and Lake Erie.
Over the last long weekend Clive and I set out to catch some carp in London, Ontario on the Thames River. We took a short detour in the morning to try chucking spoons near the mouth of the Credit River but had no luck there. It was a long drive to London, but it was totally worth it. We landed around of 6-8 fish with about a dozen hookups. They weren’t huge Toronto harbour carp by any means, they averaged about 5-12 pounds I’d guess, but they still put up a fight and a big one almost spooled me!
