I caught this beauty in May 2006 at Toronto Islands. Somehow I forgot to post it here and just came across it while looking through some old photos. The fish was caught on opening day while I was back in Ontario briefly to fish with Jon at Little Vermilion (which probably explains why I never posted it). I only visited the islands three times that year and the fishing was tough.
I had caught a small pike at the same location just minutes before this one smashed my Mepps Aglia #5. I had just made a long distance cast in one of my favorite spots. A small boat was passing by about 50 feet from where my lure hit the water. After a few cranks of the reel everything just stopped. Instinct told me to set the hook, but when I did nothing happened. It was stuck. I knew it wasn’t a snag, because I had fished that area and was familiar with the depths. Suddenly I felt a heavy head shake and I knew it was a big one. She bulldogged down into the weeds and what had felt like a big one now felt like a huge one! I managed to pull her out of the weeds after what felt like an eternity and finally got a good view as she thrashed around on the surface. I got the big pike close to shore and struggled to setup my camera on a picnic table and set the timer. She looked a little beat up, but swam away strong!
I’m just getting settled back in after a great two weeks in Ontario. I wish I could say this was a fishing trip, but it was a trip to see the family and some old friends. We flew in to Toronto and spent a couple nights at may parents place before heading two hours west to London, Ontario to visit my sister who had just given birth to a beautiful baby girl. I was hoping to take my son, niece and nephew out for some carp fishing on the Thames River but some pretty serious flood water put a stop to that. We decided a trip to the Toronto Zoo would have to make up for the lack of fishing!
Just about every animal was out and about (no doubt they wanted to see my new Fishing Fury hat), so we took well over a hundred photos at the zoo.
About a month ago I replaced my old point and shoot digital camera with the new Canon Elph SD780 IS (oh hell ya I got mine in matte black). It’s super awesome! Not only is it pretty much the same size as my old Canon Elph SD10, its got 3 times the megapixels and it shoots HD video! Check out this thread in the forum when I first got the camera, it’s got a few test shots and stuff.
This video was shot while fishing Toronto Islands last saturday where Clive and I met up with Paul. He caught this pike about 10 minutes before a huge storm formation came together and we got soaked in the rain and pelted with hail before making it to cover.
Clive and I met up on Saturday to fish the Toronto Islands together. We haven’t actually fished together since last year, so it was great to catch up and enjoy the hunt in one of our favorite Toronto fishing spots. In fact the Toronto Islands were really where the idea for this site was born. I registered the domain on June 8th 2004 which means we’ll be celebrating our first five years in a months time. Ever since 2004 we’ve been fishing our guts out and bringing our style and attitude to the world of fishing.
I got to the islands quite late, catching the 11AM ferry rather than the 8AM ferry I planned to catch. I’ve been working very long hours recently and I have a number of friends in town visiting as well as friends who will be leaving in the next few days. Everything caught up with me and I slept through my alarm for about 3 hours.
When I arrived at the islands I saw a few fisherman and said hello before finding Clive. He had teamed up with another guy named Paul (I hope that was his name, if it’s not I apologize!) who is originally from France and living here as a student. They showed me photos of the decent pike they had caught so far and about some of the more exciting follows. We’ll have to wait until Clive get’s home before we see the photo of his pike.
The weather wasn’t on our side today, with sporadic showers and thunderstorms the sun was nowhere to be found, unlike Friday which made me wish I’d called in sick for work. We covered most of the shorelines around Centre Island with a few follows here and there when the sun would make it through the clouds for a few minutes.
Clive and I didn’t land any other pike, but Paul pulled out this really nice thick 30 incher!
Though Paul has only been here for a short time it’s clear he’s putting in the dedication to finding patterns for these pike. I hope that some of the information on this site about Toronto Islands helped give him that head start to put so many fish in his logs. This one, like so many others, was released to fight another day.
After Paul’s fish the wind picked up and a storm moved in very quickly and we got stuck in the rain and got soaked. About half way to the shelter we stopped so I could put on a second layer and I noticed that it was hailing! The pieces of ice weren’t that big, about the size of a wisdom tooth, but man did they hurt when you were getting pelted with them.
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.
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 [...]
