An Impossible Catch!

Since opening our Community Forums people have been submitting great fishing logs, but one member has done something truly impossible!

Adam Eibling caught this 5.11 pound, 20 1/4 inch Pacu in the Sandusky River while fishing for carp! (via Toledo Blade)

Wow folks, just joined this site recently and already have an epic fishing story to tell… Man, Fishing Fury musta given me some good luck, maybe in the fine print it says “if you join the forum you may experience a substantial increase in bigger and more interesting catches!”… lol

So this past Monday evening, 8/31/09… I decide to go fishing at my parents house who reside on the Sandusky River near Fremont, Ohio. I’ve been in a recent fishing slump so I decide to use dough balls for carp – you know just want to fight a bigger fish regardless of species… was in dire need to hear my drag, been way too long. Who would have ever guessed I wouldn end up bring in a PACU?! I’m still in shock, excited, speechless yet can’t quit talking about it…. hard to describe what it’s like to catch something like this – so off the wall and unexpected.

Read the more in the Fishing Fury Community Forums..

Toronto Islands Pike, Opening Weekend

My good friend Martin Szomolanyi and I started our morning launching out of Humber Bay and taking a very cold but also very fast boat ride out to the islands. We started fishing from the East end to the West end covering the inner channels and the outer city facing shorelines. We spotted a ton of pike in only our first few hours there, most pike would follow right up to the boat and then turn away. We even spotted pike swimming right past our boat without a care in the world.

It wasn’t long until we starting hooking into them, first I hooked into a small pike that completely missed my lure and ended up getting his mouth wrapped up in a fluorocarbon leader and just refused to let go. Once I got him close enough to the boat and notice my xrap was swimming care free about an inch away from the fish I quickly grabbed him behind the head and pulled him out of the water.

Continue reading “Toronto Islands Pike, Opening Weekend”…

Martin Reels In First Place On Sturgeon

Our good friend Martin wrote in yesterday to let us know how his York Bassmasters tournament on Sturgeon Lake went, and much to our surprise given the crazy weather we continue to have here. Martin pulled out a huge win, and some huge bass!

I was privileged enough to draw 2 time angler of the year Don Mahar of York Bassmasters. We started the day heading out to a well known rocky shoal on Sturgeon, while most of the rest stuck to the river leading out to Sturgeon from Lindsay. We landed our limit within the first 20 minutes, a nice hand full of smallies, but nothing large. We kept fishing those rock piles, landing and culling our catches still in search of a few big boys. Eventually, Don had a nice 2.5 lbs largemouth which meant we were in business. Soon after we headed across to the other side of the bay and Don comes up big with a 4 lbs smallie. We had a few more culls along that end and we had ourselves a pretty good bag for the day. There was heavy heavy rain all morning , we were absolutely soaked from the rain. On our way back to the weigh in , we made one last stop along the river, 2 casts in Don lands yet another big largemouth around 3.5 and we headed in for weigh in. We turned out to have 14 lbs and big fish at around 4lbs which gave us 1st place and big fish award.

Second place was 11.5 , with a 3.25 lbs largemouth.

Congratulations on the win Martin, those are beautiful bass.

Scugog Mid June Musky Report

Last week Martin, who you may remember from a previous trip to Scugog or his Picton fishing log, and I planned a trip to fish for musky on Lake Scugog. We arrived at the boat launch around 11:30pm on Friday and chatted with a few of the locals that were hanging around and fishing off the dock for walleye.

Apparently though, the fishing has been off due to the extremely bizarre weather conditions we’ve been having in this region. Twice now in the past week there have been hail storms, lightning that can blow you away, even reports photos of funnel clouds forming in Toronto’s east end (more).

Since I was so caught up with work in May, I missed all opportunities to go fishing on Toronto Islands for some of the hottest pike fishing in the GTA: this would be my first fishing trip of the year.

We started the morning bright and early, got the boat launched and headed out. It wasn’t long before Martin had a hit and nice 25″ or so Scugog musky. I thought for sure the day was going to be awesome, and not soon after I had a massive strike from a musky of my own, definitely larger than the first. A huge jump, splash, and suddenly my lure was catapulted back to the boat and my musky was gone.

For the rest of the day, we fished with little success, even with my Lakemaid Miss Musky t-shirt for good luck, it couldn’t stop the weather from turning on us. Another storm front was on its way and we decided to head back up the lake closer to the boat launch in case the storm crossed paths with us. Not soon after we had a failure of our trolling motor and decided to head in to try and fix it. We spent a few hours going around Port Perry trying to find some spare parts or figure out what the problem was, but once 7pm started to roll around we knew the day was pretty much shot. We packed it all in and headed home.

Martin will be fishing in the B.A.S.S. opener tournament on Scugog Sturgeon, so wish him luck! If I had known sooner I would have loved to get “Fishing Fury” on his shirt or something as a sponsor but maybe we can pull that together for the next one.

From the Table of Adam Guy: Japanese Stone Flounder

Recently I received this great email from Adam Guy, who also runs a great Japanese blog- The Compleat Tsuribito, it makes a great appetizer for Japanese fishing and cooking in a nice bite sized package.

Adam Guy writes:

One of my fishing buddies volunteered to drive, so we decided to go fishing for a flatfish known locally as ‘ishigarei’ (Stone flounder; Kareius bicoloratus) from the port of Kashima, which is on the Pacific coast of Japan, in Ibaragi Prefecture. My mate and I took three each, including one good-sized fish each; since this was the first attempt at this kind of fishing for both of us, we did quite well.

Unusually the ishigarei does not have scales, but instead a few bony protrusions (the Japanese refer to them as ‘stones’ hence the name) on the skin on its dorsal surface, that produce copious amounts of a rather foul-smelling fish slime. However, if one removes these the fillet of the fish possesses a firm, white yet oily flesh that is quite delicious. Also, unlike most flatfish, they grow quite large and can prove quite amusing to catch; the largest one I took was 47cm long and put up a tremendous fight. To ensure their anglers enjoy the eating of their catch as much as the fishing, most boathouses will kill, bleed and de-stone the fish that you catch for you when you get back to port, and give you salt to rub into their skin to reduce the slime, before packing the fish in ice and going home.

Continue reading “From the Table of Adam Guy: Japanese Stone Flounder”…

Sturna’s Sunday Submissions from Scugog

This morning I found this awesome email, complete with photos from a local fan who has just started getting in to musky fishing on Lake Scugog.

Mike Sturna writes:

I want to thank the guys at fishingfury.com for putting up such a great web site. It’s the best site around for the everyday angler. You posted pictures of muskie caught on Lake Scugog, and found it helpful since you can see what area of Scugog the muskie were caught. I never caught a muskie before last year and have been fishing all of my life, but this would probably be due to being intimidated by all the jargon that’s around on the web as well as magazines. It always seemed to me that the allusive muskie was a fish extremely hard to catch, but after these past few summers, have come to the conclusion that it seems to be all in the anglers head. It wasn’t until this summer, that I really put in a lot of work to find the holding locations for the fish as well as the proper techniques to land them. I have had the privileged of taking many people out this summer, and seen the many smiles on their faces when they hook into their first ever muskie, but like we know, it won’t be their last.

For some reason, it’s very addictive, and have not pursued any other species of game fish since landing my first decent sized one. On average, I have been lucky to land approximately 3-4 muskie a day when out fishing, with some larger bass taking the bait as well. I wish that the popular magazines out there dealing with the angling world, would take the time to let the readers know that this game species is not as hard to find and catch as is led to believe. It’s more about the angler getting over the intimidation, than it is finding ways to bring them into the boat. I hope that someday I will see fishing fury on TV and wish your team the best of luck getting there. Keep up the good work. I have also sent some pictures along with this email, because I know, your team having a love of fishing, can appreciate the excitement and beauty of landing muskie.

As you can see, Mike definitely knows where to find the musky on Lake Scugog, but I think he’s still working on his holding technique..

Thank you very much for the email and photos Mike, I will get in touch with you soon and maybe we can head out for a day on Scugog in search of muskie. I have yet to catch a musky on Scugog in fact, so you’d be doing me a great favor, hah!