The Orca
June 22, 2011
The orca raised a tall black dorsal fin and followed the salmon in towards Bird Rock where about a dozen boats were fishing. One guy had a salmon on and you could tell the orca could hear it, but he passed in the wrong direction and came towards our boat. The fisherman hastily hauled his salmon out of the water.
The creature surfaced close to our boat, opening a big hole in the water, then he slid out of sight for a few minutes, to appear a hundred yards away on his side with a slashing motion which left one pectoral fin high in the air. Brian, our guide, said that that slashing motion with his head is how the orca kills salmon, though he can’t understand how they catch them.
It wasn’t that the orca wasn’t aware of our presence. He had sought out the concentration of fishing boats and salmon coming in to feed on the tide, and he acted utterly fearless around man. I realized that for the first time in my experience I wasn’t the top predator in this environment.
I had asked Brian if I could see some whales yesterday. A half-hour later he pointed out a humpback whale about a mile away. Another rose. “I think there are four or five in that group.” Surely enough, they were soon all around us, though they kept their distance as we jigged for halibut.
Ten minutes before he appeared I’d asked Brian if we would see a killer whale. Then this one appeared. But the orca was different than the humpbacks. He sought us out. Brian told us he’d done the same thing on Sunday, taking a salmon from a bemused fisherman. This time he came into 50’ of water, right near shore. No wonder people worship these creatures.
After the orca left Tony and I hit into our first double, with a pair of chinooks knocking the lines off the downriggers at the same time. We released the fifteen and seventeen pound fish to keep room on our limit for “better” fish. I was a bit skeptical about this, but deferred to Brian’s opinion. He hasn’t been wrong so far.
Then I hit a good one. I’d landed a 23 pound Chinook the first day, and this fish looked to be the same size, but it had easily twice the strength, energy, and endurance. Things got quite busy at Bird Rock as Brian and Tony tried to keep lines and cables out of the “wanna-be-tyee’s” way. I had thought the tyee title for a 30 lb. or heavier fish was just tourism. Now I wasn’t so sure. The fight went on and on, but the fish tired first – most likely because of the superb mooching rod on which I was playing him.
This fish wasn’t much heavier than the one on Monday, but it was in another order of magnitude for sport. I could now see what Brian meant by “waiting for a better fish.”
Then we ran out to 184’ and dropped herring to the bottom to fish for halibut. Brian clearly dislikes bottom fishing, but allowed Tony and me one each to fill our limits.
An innocent abroad in British Columbia
June 19, 2011
Mallards are unsentimental creatures. The flock through which I had to wade to get to the Pacific couldn’t care less about hygiene, so my first mouthful of salt water had a rather feathery backtaste. Where did this custom come from, anyway? This proved just the first of several initiation pranks my vacation destination held in store for me.
In planning this west-coast expedition Tony included a day for a tour of Vancouver. First up was his favourite spot, Deep Harbour. I had to agree with him on this choice, for this calm harbour has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. The trees, the plantings, the floating marina in mid-bay, all combine to make the place perfect for the photographer. Tony took me to the memorial bench the family have established to commemorate the fondness his father, mother, and uncle had for this spot.
We also had to try Trolls, his favourite fish-and-chips restaurant in Horseshoe Bay. The double portions of halibut were delicious. From the elevated dock across the street I spotted two young men weighing live prawn, so I made a death-defying descent down a long ramp (low tide, eh?) and relieved the fishermen of a kilo of live shrimp. The guy dumped them into a bag which they promptly made into a net with repeated puncture wounds from legs and spines.
The next lesson the west coast offered: no impulse buy goes unpunished. Tony reminded me that we had to complete our tour and get the prawn home in the back of a borrowed Cadillac without getting prawn-scent on the upholstery. Off we went shopping until we had come up with a bag of ice and a Styrofoam cooler. Turns out the Caddy has a cargo net in the trunk which might have been designed in answer to this question. It held the cooler in place and no upholstery was injured in the making of this column.
Today I discovered what it’s like to fish on a river which flows at a minimum of twelve miles per hour. Dean Werk owns Great River Fishing Adventures. He took Tony’s sister Sharon and niece Amy with us in his Customweld jet-driven riverboat. Powered by a 6.2 litre supercharged GM engine, the thing felt as if it could out-accelerate a 737 up to fifty miles per hour.
The first time Tony sent me a picture of a sturgeon he had caught with Dean, I accused him of photo-shopping the shot as a prank. There was no way he could casually hold a 150 pound fish in his arms in the water like that. He decided that at first opportunity he’d get his own back by watching me deal with a beast which tried to tear my arms out of their sockets on a strong and unpredictable run.
And unpredictable the sturgeon proved to be this day. While eight of them picked up the baits tethered to the bottom by lead weights behind the boat, none took the hook. But they weren’t especially shy. Several did noisy rolls on the surface and one monster blasted out of the water right at the stern of the boat. I bit my tongue out of tact. It was Tony who muttered: “We gotta get a bigger boat” in tribute to the Jaws moment. Nine hours later when we were too numb from the cold to care, another jumped so close to the bow of the boat that it almost landed in the chain locker.
But the day was in other ways quite a success. The Fraser River provides the photographer a wonderful look at the mountains which surround it. These aren’t hills: they’re the real deal, mountains. Even though they are covered with inviting green foliage, everyone I asked agreed that you couldn’t climb one. The vegetation is too dense to move through it for any distance. It’s a jungle on a 45 degree angle.
I easily confirmed this estimate of one mountain’s slope just by looking out the window. It was easy to trace the mountain’s line diagonally across a square window panel.
The first thing I had done upon awakening on my first day in this time zone had been to go outside and hug a tree. This turned into a very interesting session, squishing around in the rain among the towering cedar trees on the property. Cedars here look very much like eastern white cedars in Leeds County, except that these western variants have had long, wet seasons and no frost to inhibit their growth.
I noticed fewer species here than at home, but they grow in rich profusion. Wild blackberries, for example, are so successful here that highway departments have hired brush-cutting machines to clear the roadsides of the thorny fruit-bearers. Too many berry pickers have come to grief by falling from cliff faces onto busy driving lanes, or parking unwisely on tortuous mountain roads.
But the evergreens rule in B.C. They’re huge, tall and straight. They dominate the landscape and comfort and enrich its inhabitants.
Tomorrow we’re off to Masset by 737, then over to the Queen Charlotte Lodge by helicopter for five days of salmon fishing.
The new rod jinx, or How to Lose a Splake
May 6, 2011
Wayne Bennett, owner of Bennett’s Bait N’ Tackle, set me up with the rod himself. He said the choice between a short trolling rod and a long one was a matter of convenience in the boat rather than flex. He sold me a sturdy, short rod designed for lead-core line and my awkward Daiwa line-counter reel.
My success at downrigging for splake had diminished to nothing over the last few years, but my pal Tony has done well on Indian Lake with the much quieter lead-core line. The new rod was an attempt to improve my deep-water success with a fresh try at this old technique.
It was blowing pretty hard Friday evening, but I bashed through the chop across Newboro and Clear Lakes, coasted through the Isthmus and found the relative calm of the south shore of Indian, near Chaffey’s Locks. At first I dragged the lure around behind the Merc 35, running into the breeze to keep the speed down. Nothing. Approaching the spot where I had caught a splake the weekend before, I decided to use the electric motor again. Quiet and slow was worth a try.
One afternoon a few years ago I happened upon a tight school of 12” splake, most likely just dumped in from a hatchery. It was great fun catching and releasing the naïve fish, but they were much harder to hook than you might think. The trouble was they kept ripping my little tube jigs apart without getting hooked. After a while I realized that on a typical strike, a splake swims up quickly from behind, then with the tip of its mouth it grabs the trailing “fin” of the lure and tries to tear it off. An instant of hesitation with a slack line greatly increased my hook-set efficiency.
On a whim I added a stinger hook with a small tube jig to the treble on the silver spoon.
The line was no sooner down to 75 feet than I felt an unmistakable strike, and this time the fish had hung on to one or the other of the hooks. This was a strong fish. With 200 feet of lead-core line out behind the stiff, awkward rod, sensations were pretty vague. Truth be known I spent most of the time on that first retrieve trying to find a way to hold the rod. The butt was too long. It didn’t fit anywhere. Eventually I straddled the thing and cranked.
The fish came clanking in. I don’t quite know how the fish created that rattling sensation. It must have something to do with the metal line. Or maybe it was my heart racing.
Now I have landed a lot of fish in the last fifty years, so I’m fairly confident about bringing one up to the boat. Normally. This time I wasn’t. Trouble was I had a heavy splake on a very stiff, short rod. Normally I keep the rod tip up and rely on its spring to absorb the shock when the fish sees the boat and decides to leave.
My best bass rod is so good at this that I can just hang on and let the rod wear the fish out. But it cost three hundred dollars. The one Wayne had just sold me ran twenty-eight. I couldn’t count on this stick to play my fish for me, so I loosened the reel’s drag to compensate.
The 16 pound monofilament leader was about twelve feet long. This caused part of the problem because every time the end of the leader would come out of the water, I kept disengaging the reel, allowing it to free-spool against my thumb. I worried that the fish would run, overpower the drag, and break off.
I did get a couple of good looks at the splake, a very large, slow-moving specimen as it crossed under the boat. On one pass it also provided an excellent view of its lunch, scattered through the clear water.
Brought up from 75 feet, a lake trout would be pretty well finished from the pressure change, but not a splake. This fish was just starting to realize that it was in a serious fight, and somehow I kept hoping to ambush it with my little bass net. It was way too big for that net, but I clutched it anyway. In retrospect I guess I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. With two hands on the rod I might not have failed to prevent the stiff lead line from a backlash the next time the fish bolted. As soon as the lead-core kinked, the leader snapped and I numbly reeled in my empty line. That’s how fish get to be big.
I’ve got to get a bigger net. I need to learn to trust the drag on that damned reel and not release the clutch — under any conditions — while playing a fish. A big splake isn’t going to let me tow it up to the boat like a bass. I’ll have to tire it out first.
That splake was big. Two days later when I whined to Opinicon guide Lennie Pyne about the lost fish, he smiled and told me that the largest splake caught last year out of Indian Lake weighed over 16 pounds.
Filed in fish stories
Tags: Chaffey's Locks, goofs, Indian Lake, lead core line, Rideau Lakes fishing, trolling, trolling for splake, trolling motor
First splake-fishing trip of the year
May 3, 2011
Saturday, April 30th, the morning dawned calm and warm and I had discovered a forgotten downrigger rod with lead-core line, so I hopped into the boat and ran over to Indian Lake to see if I could find a splake. I had never really considered using the Moto-Guide to troll for splake before, but the Mercury, while it runs strongly at speed, idles like a barrel of empty cans rolling down a flight of stairs. Every rivet and fitting on the boat vibrates. The fish might not mind, but I hate the sound.
So I tried the lead line while trolling silently on the electric motor at a gentle speed. Lead core line is hard to unwind and reel in again. I hate the expensive, but awkward Diawa line-counter reel on which I have it spooled. It has no balance at all, so everything is a chore with it.
I dragged a silver spoon around the usual haunts and got a few of the usual splake bumps, but no solid strikes. Splake are prone to swimming up quickly behind a lure, then grabbing the round part of the hook with the tips of their mouths and suddenly turning left, shaking the lure enough to notice, but missing the hooks.
How do I know this? One afternoon I encountered a school of 12″ splake which must have just been stocked. They were clustered under a raft of timbers next to the shore, attempting to hide from a pair of loons which made regular sorties in for a snack.
Curious, I grabbed my light rod, put on a small crappie jig, and teased the naive fish to bite. To my surprise they struck willingly on a chartreuse tube jig, but I couldn’t hook them: they just kept tearing the tentacles off the tube jig. So I watched. Splake seem genetically programmed to accelerate suddenly behind prey, then to bite off the tail in a tearing motion to one side. This turn makes the striking fish very hard to hook.
With practice I discovered that if I hesitated a bit, the splake held on more often. Gradually I developed the knack of hooking them. After catching and releasing a couple of hundred dumb hatchery fish I grew bored, but I had had ample opportunity to observe up close how splake strike.
This day, without a stinger hook on my lure or any inclination to thread a mud minnow onto one and increase my odds, I contentedly floated around the calm lake and enjoyed the day. Then my rod started to jump a bit. Playing a fish on a downrigger rod is a rather numb sensation at the best of times. The same thing with two hundred feet of lead-core line is like trying to type with mitts on. Nonetheless I brought up the yearling splake and cheerfully dropped it into the well.
The big difference between a splake and a lake trout: a laker brought up from 80 feet is just about dead. A splake’s all ready to fight. With the cold water in the well, my prize remained frisky for several hours.
No more fish struck this day, but I had earned bragging rights for the season’s first splake. It grilled up very nicely for Sunday lunch.
The Asian Carp Menace
March 5, 2011
The Detroit Free Press had the following on March 5th:
Feng Yang, the Markham, Ontario, man who pleaded guilty to possession of more than 4,000 pounds of prohibited live carp this week in Windsor, was also convicted in 2006.
Ed Posliff, a Windsor attorney who prosecuted the more recent incident, said Yang had run afoul of invasive species regulations on another earlier occasion as well, but was not convicted.
He is the owner of a fish importation business that supplies restaurants and markets in Ontario, including Toronto. The plea deal prohibits him from possessing invasive species, alive or dead, for three years.
Posliff said provincial authorities have prosecuted about a half dozen violations of the ban since it was imposed in 2005.
Feng Yang’s $50,000 fine and the previous $40,000 fine for the same offence in 2006 are apparently the cost of doing business in the hot live-fish market serving the Asian community.
When I wrote Flying Carp, and the Fun of a Sensational News Story in 2008, I felt it safe to assume that these invaders would be kept out of Ontario lakes by legislation, common sense, and an electric gate in Chicago to prevent the passage of fish up the canal from the Illinois River into Lake Michigan.
Unfortunately it appears as though common sense is non-existent in the urban marketplace. Disturbing rumours refer to the Asian tradition of buying a live fish and letting it go on special occasions to bring good luck. These rumours become more than urban legends when supported by a handful of newspaper reports from Ottawa, Sarnia, and Montreal of exotic and destructive fish caught by fishermen in city waterways. One even ended up in a Toronto fountain.
Bigheaded carp is the generic term for silver and bighead carp, imported to the United States from Asia in the 1970′s to clear catfish ponds and sewage lagoons of algae. Since then the two species have overrun the Mississippi River and spread north up the Illinois River as far as Chicago.
The spectacular jumping habits of nervous silver carp are the stuff of YouTube legend. When disturbed by the sound of an outboard motor, the fish leap wildly into the air, often landing in the boat or striking passengers. This makes for hilarious video footage, but water skiing and even small boat operation are seriously hampered by their presence. One observer likened a boat ride in an infested area to “getting hit by flying bowling balls at random intervals.”
Even more devastating, though, are the exotic carps’ enthusiastic feeding and breeding habits.
Duane C. Chapman, USGS Fisheries Biologist, saw my 2008 article and sent along a number of clarifications based upon his own research with bigheaded carp.
First, Chapman pointed out that there is no such thing as a triploid (genetically sterile) silver or bighead carp. Only for the very different grass carp have scientists developed a sterile variant.
The reason for the alarm is that these carp have a reputation for eating their way through the entire ecosystem of a lake or river. The only disagreement has to do with how quickly they can do it. Recent studies have claimed that a female silver or bighead can lay one or two million eggs at a hatch. The fish reach spawning maturity early, and they compete relentlessly with native species. Chapman’s current research concerns the analysis of how much damage the silver and bighead carp have done to the areas they have invaded.
“I have data … that shows that zooplankton populations in the low velocity habitats used by bighead and silver carps (together, known as the “bigheaded carps”) are MUCH lower than prior to the invasion. These things do not bode well for native fishes, especially fishes that require the same habitats as bigheaded carps and that are planktivorous throughout their life (like paddlefish, bigmouth buffalo, and the important preyfish gizzard shad)….Time will tell what we see in the future. Predictions are tough, although risk assessments on these fish are uniform in the opinion that it would be risky to have these fish invade.”
Chapman did specify, however, that Illinois catfish fishing is still world-class, so the invaders haven’t completely devastated the river ecology.
But we don’t want them here. Ontario’s waterways are the heart of our tourism industry. We can’t allow them to be destroyed because some stubborn individual insists upon smuggling in destructive fish to make a buck – or other, equally stubborn individuals let fish go out of carelessness or nostalgia.
A few minutes on YouTube will produce a nauseating explanation for the live-fish market. There is plenty of footage there of partially-cooked bighead carp eaten alive by enthusiastic diners. It’s bad enough to ship these fish for days in tanks with no water; to my mind it’s even worse to deep fry all but the head and then pick the flesh away from its bones while the victim looks at you from the platter.
Eating partially-cooked fish alive is cruel and barbaric. Canadian voters have the clout to insist upon enforcement of the ban on the sale of live food fish.
Legislators have become remarkably draconian in their rules for the seizure of assets of accused drug traffickers. To put an end to this despicable live-carp market, we need a law which ensures similar asset seizure for those caught trafficking in live fish.
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/flying-carp/
http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/article/949029–man-fined-50-000-for-importing-asian-carp
http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/Importer-Fined-for-Asian-Carp-
Filed in Conservation Issues, fish stories
Tags: Asian fishermen, eating live fish, flying carp, illegal fishing, invasive species
A break from winter
February 17, 2011
I think we’ve crested the hill of this winter, because this morning was achingly beautiful on Young’s Hill, the kind of ache which needs some time along moving water to calm. So in I went to the spillway in Chaffey’s beside the Old Mill. There’s a well-established track through the deep snow down to the end of the point. Apparently I’m not the only winter fisherman.
I tossed a lure into the moderate current while watching a large bird swim out past the little islands. It was the size of a Trumpeter swan, but dark in colour, and mercifully quiet. Ice cover is half-way out the 48 hour dock from the lock, so I tossed to the edge of the ice a couple of times. Thought I saw a flash behind the lure once, but it was likely a combination of sun and clouds. It seemed like a splake at the time, though.
I parked near Dorothy’s, decided against snowshoes to get to the water’s edge, and walked up the road under the railroad bridge instead. Vehicles have had a wicked time getting up that little hill lately, to judge by the tracks. One car took out some sumacs when it went between the driveway and the turn, and the whole hill was pock-marked with holes created by spinning wheels. Glad I walked.
A visit to the Isthmus separating Indian and Clear Lakes seemed indicated, so I tried a few casts there and saw a pair of Trumpeters living around the bubbler on the boathouse just to the north of the Ferry. The open water from this bubbler would be a factor for anyone trying to get to the Island on the ice, so be warned.
The ice isn’t open all that far out either way. The navigation markers on Indian are iced in. While standing on the Ferry I could see a couple of vehicles (ATV-sized) and a few people out on Indian, obviously fishing splake.
It was a pleasant outing and I was able to return home in time for lunch. That’s freedom of a sort.
Tony Reports: It always happens.
January 21, 2011
So I’m out there for hours. Jiggin’, minnowin’ etc. So I finally have to have a wizz. So I go on the other side of the truck and just before I finish I hear something behind me. One of the rods is getting dragged down the hole! So I quickly zip up and run to rod … snnnnnnnnap. Line broke. Cleaned right off. I go to the truck to re-hook and reload and I hear a sound behind me. It’s the other rod being dragged down the hole (it was only about 20′ from the other one). I grab the rod and give it a very light strike …snnnnnap. That line broke off too. I suspect a very hungry pike (fully sated now), as the rods just got hammered. No warning, just wham. That was around 4:15. Finally came in around 5:15 after no other bites. Oh well. Nice day out there.
Moby Trout
January 16, 2011
I mentioned in an email to Tom last week that I had a yarn about a brown trout that gave me fits one summer in Peterborough, and I promised to throw in a beautiful, six foot Italian woman in a bikini for good measure. Tom hung on every word, but I told him he could wait for their trip to Westport next weekend for the Jack de Keyzer concert to get the final version of the yarn.
Then I had to sit down to write the thing.
We’d bought Wybmadiity II that spring, gotten her home from Toronto by the middle of June, and then I received a call from the Ministry of Education that I’d been accepted into the Principal’s Course in Peterborough beginning in one week.
“Peterborough? But we’ve just bought a boat, and I don’t have a place to keep it yet.”
“Bring it along! We’ll go for boat rides. The course is on the Trent campus.”
Turns out I wasn’t the first would-be school administrator to arrive at Trent by boat for the course, but I may have been the only one without a car along, as well.
Trent University is beautifully situated on the Otonabee River, just before the run of locks leading to Lakefield and the Kawartha Lakes. In the early eighties docking wasn’t scarce, but the campus still lay a fair distance from Peterborough and a supermarket, a factor which became more and more pressing as my meager supplies of food ran down.
With fishing rods aboard, I looked to the river for sustenance. But the water was alive only with tiny sunfish and carp so huge I was afraid to dive into the murky flow for fear of hitting one.
I’d never touched a carp, but it looked as though a single fish would provide a lot of protein. Despite my best efforts and their abundance, though, I couldn’t get a carp to take my hook. The fish swam around openly in the eddies below the dams, but they seemed about as smart as pigs. On the farm I could never catch them, either.
But I was getting hungry, so I spent some time up at the dam, trying.
Then a young couple drove up in a brand new BMW. Blue, it was, because the lady in the car quickly shed her outer garments to a designer bikini which matched the car. She was a six-foot redhead, and quite a beauty. Her companion was a short guy with a lot of gold chains and other jewelry. He opened the trunk and assembled a very fine, heavy bait-casting rod. The wife removed a diving belt with a huge, vicious-looking knife attached to it. She clipped a stringer to the belt, and as she waded out into the waist-deep water below the spillway, let it drift in the current.
All eyes were on this apparition who cheerfully chatted with members of the growing audience. I noticed the husband put a small potato on his line and cast it in front of one of the steady procession of huge carp which trooped in single file through the current. To my astonishment, the fish immediately took the bait and the fight was on.
His jewelry flashed a lot in the sun as he played the carp, but the guy certainly knew what he was doing. Before long the carp turned belly-up. He gave it slack and it dropped down to the Amazon waiting in the middle of the current below the eddy. With a single movement she drew the huge knife, killed the fish with a stab through the head, and gutted what must have been a twenty-pound carp with an incredibly efficient series of movements. Then she hooked the dead fish to her stringer, took a stance against the increased drag of the spillway, and waited for the next fish.
The guy baited up and had another on his next cast. The team repeated the process with each fish, jubilant at their success in laying in a stock of carp for smoking. The show was too good for anyone to pass up. Even the Asian anglers left their lines and came to watch this amazing demonstration of skill. Normally they showed interest only in bluegills.
When the redhead had added the sixth large carp to her stringer, she waded out of the current and her husband helped her carry the huge load of fish up the bank and drop them into the trunk of the BMW. Away they went, all smiles and waves to their appreciative audience. They had been at the lockstation an amazingly short time to collect close to a hundred pounds of fish.
I made a few futile casts, even tried a bit of potato the guy had dropped on the grass, but the carp wouldn’t even look at my hook. It was going to be canned corn for supper tonight if I didn’t do something.
With my ultralight rod I worked my way around the dam just below campus. In the ruins of an abandoned factory I spotted some small fish under a patch of vegetation. If I could get a jig down there I could at least have some fun with these smallmouths and maybe get a meal as there is no 12 inch size limit on the Trent Waterway.
The first fish struck eagerly and I hauled up what turned out to be a ten-inch rainbow trout. All right, that will do. I didn’t know there were trout in the Trent, but I was hungry so I caught two more and cooked them on the little alcohol stove and had a decent meal with the can of corn and a pot of coffee.
It seemed as though my protein problem had found a solution, but as the week went on the supply of fish diminished, and a large trout developed the habit of moving out to look at my bait. When it was afoot, the smaller fish hid.
There was no way I could lift this big one twenty feet up to the top of the wall with four-pound test line, so I switched to the heavy rod. But the large fish wouldn’t bite, and when it was active, the smaller trout wouldn’t come my tube jig, either. No dice.
Moby Trout had it in for me and I went hungry for two days. I had to catch that fish. In desperation I walked to a roadside stand along the highway and bought a pack of worms for bait.
Bright and early I approached the old factory and dabbed a wiggling earthworm on the still-dark surface of the water. Noses peeked out from under the weeds, but no fish came out for the easy meal. Moby Trout made a pass, turned up his nose at my offering, and returned to his lair.
I made do with a diet of muffins from the coffee shop for the day. The following morning the scenario repeated itself, and I was running out of cash, as well as food. Friday morning I tried a final time. As soon as the worm touched the water the big trout exploded out from under the weeds and detonated on that worm. The battle was on, but I had the upper hand, literally, as I cranked my startled opponent up the sheer face of the abandoned factory wall.
Then I triumphantly paraded my three-pound brown trout through the biology department on my way back to the boat. Had to weigh it, eh? I wish I could tell you my trophy was delicious, but in fact it didn’t taste very good at all. The smaller ones had been much better. But I had saved up a lot of appetite over the week, so down it went at one sitting, the whole fish.
Another guy in my class heard about my success and showed up later in the day with his equipment and had just gotten his line into the water when the attendant came along to feed the fish and caught him trespassing in the Trent University Trout Pond! He had some tall explaining to do about the missing stock, but I don’t think he told on me.
Honest. It was just an old, sunken foundation with water running through it. There was no sign, no indication that it was anything but a good fishing spot, and I had no idea that trout didn’t swim free in the Trent system. Honest.
First fishing trip of the year
January 9, 2011
Tony had sent me emails all week about a weekend fishing expedition but Saturday’s weather wasn’t fit, so I had hoped he’d stay quiet until the sun came out. Surely enough, at 6:30 Sunday morning an email came about two young guys on an ATV tearing across the lake to an ice hut. I started to get moving, a process which takes much longer now than it used to. First I had to finish reading the online newspapers, then build up the fire in the garage, load up the Ranger and stop for gas.
By 8:30 I had arrived at the Lodge, only to discover Tony in the kitchen trying to decipher the instructions on a box of microwave porridge. Still in pyjamas. Anne waved from the living room, deep in contemplation of her laptop. Not much happening here yet, either.
I headed out to drill some holes and give the weekend warriors some time to get their act together.
So there I was, settling in to the first ice fishing expedition of the year on Newboro Lake, and I got to thinking, “This is a new year. When does my fishing license expire?” Of course I couldn’t look: the print on the Outdoor Card is too fine to read without aid, and I had left my glasses at home because of the cold wind.
This is an annual problem. As I recall, last year at the beginning of bass season I handed the card to Wayne Bennett of Bennett’s Bait’n Tackle and asked for an interpretation. Wayne is used to these cards. I think he told me then that I had another year to go.
Apart from that worry, it was a nice morning on the lake, though a bit quiet. The fish weren’t exactly leaping out of the holes, but this is normal for winter fishing in this area.
Two young fellows from Brockville had established their presence early off the shore of Mulcaster Island and had three fine crappie and two pike at the time I spoke to them. Very energetic fishermen, these guys had towed a large toboggan loaded with equipment out from the village, then ran down what looked to be dozens of holes with a power auger, setting a couple up with electronic fish finders and others with still sets and trips, as well as their personal fishing rods.
When fishing with plastic produced only an occasional largemouth bass (pat on head and release), I ventured up Water Street to Burtch’s Live Bait, where Doug set me up with some jigging minnows and reminded me that the Annual Newboro Ice Fishing Derby is on February 13th this year, part of the Newboro Winter Carnival that weekend.
Tony had completed his breakfast and was waiting for me when I came back from the bait shop.
Out off Emerald Island Gary Warriner walked up to us. We renewed acquaintances: Gary and I were in the same phys ed classes at Rideau District High School many years ago. Gary’s a cautious ice traveler. To get to Emerald Island he drove to a cottage on the mainland and then walked across a quarter-mile of ice with a knapsack of tools to get to his job site. So Tony and I picked Gary’s brain about ice conditions and routes around the lake.
Two fishermen had come out with an SUV and a pickup truck, though. They didn’t seem to catch any more than Tony and I did, but I noticed they drove their heavy vehicles quite slowly on their way off the lake. Gary had mentioned that it takes less ice to hold a truck if it moves slowly. Dumb and happy, we bombed by at 25 mph with the light Ranger.
Most holes we drilled showed about 8 to 9” of ice. In one wind-swept strait between islands Tony hit water at 14”. I guess a freeze-thaw cycle like last week’s can produce some anomalies depending upon heat loss, because in one spot I found only seven inches of ice. That was in a sheltered bay, near rocks. One spot above a submerged rock tight to shore looked very weak, but I didn’t risk a soaking to test it.
So what was it like, fishing through the ice for the first time this year? It was cold, and there weren’t many fish around. You know it’s a slow day when an occasional snag on an underwater weed is enough to get your heart pounding.
But still it’s great to get out there. It’s vast and clean and fresh and unspoiled and at peace. It’s Newboro Lake, one of the most beautiful places I know, and it’s good for the soul just to go out and wander around it, regardless of the season.
Many years ago I joined a group of Little Rideau pickerel fishermen on a shoal out off Narrow’s Locks. It was a beautiful, still afternoon with the sun beating down on the snow. There were no fish. One old guy turned to the fellow next to him and said, “Just think. I could be at home right now, fighting with the wife.” The other guy grinned, and nobody left until the sun went down.
The season between snow and bugs
March 15, 2010
A few years ago my neighbour Howard Chant and I were talking about the coming of spring. To his surprise, I admitted I couldn’t recall the date the ice went out last year. He flipped through his notebook and had the date in about three seconds. Then he went back to his discourse on soil temperature and planting corn.
Why would a grain and dairy farmer know about when the ice goes out when I, a confirmed boater and early-season fisherman, didn’t have a clue? Years of observation and note-taking, I guess.
Last Friday was the first day in a long time I have gone to Chaffey’s to watch the water flow. It’s an annual urge to track the thaw and look for the first fish of the season.
We have a wonderful year of fishing in North Leeds, but no trip sticks in the mind like the first of the season. The beauty of the MNR’s splake-stocking program over the last twenty years is that it has provided early-season anglers with a good reason to get out on the water well in advance of even the most optimistic cottager. With no closed season on this end of the Rideau, splake provide a fishing season between snow and bugs.
In fact, the very best splake fishing of the year on Indian Lake is the day the ice goes out. The fish are up at the surface then, and can be attracted with small Mepps, spoons or Rapallas on light line. Of course they are very shy of boats at that time of year, so long casts are the norm.
Indian Lake Marina owner Wayne Wilson has watched the early-season optimists for years now. He once told me they start as soon as the ice moves out from shore enough that they can get a boat through, and they catch splake along the edge of the ice all around the lake. The odd time somebody will get stranded on the wrong side of Indian by a wind shift, but for the most part they get back to the dock successfully, and with some good fish.
Personally, I have had mixed results on ice-out day. One foggy morning I was planing across Indian in a hurry to get to Benson Creek when I noticed a couple of sea gulls walking on the water ahead of me. Strange, sea gulls normally float…. ICE!! I jammed into reverse and stopped the boat inches from a large pack of ice hanging just below the surface. Good thing the gulls were there.
I’ve spent a couple of other days casting close to shore in sunny, quiet bays. An occasional splake would rocket out of nowhere and end up in my net. One memorable 2 ½ pounder took my Mepps on the south shore of Scott Island one day. It fought like a speckled trout, leaping repeatedly and showing great strength and endurance for its size. When I cleaned it, the fish’s stomach was chock-full of tiny insects. I assumed they were black fly larvae. Many return trips to that shoreline have yet to produce another fish to match that one.
Two other days were more typical. On one I caught two large splake before my hands froze to where I could no longer cast or retrieve my line. Frequent trips ashore to run up and down the road and warm up were all that kept me alive out there that day. Another still, sunny day in Benson Creek produced no activity of any sort, save that of passing mallards and an occasional goose. I stopped for lunch, allowing my little wooden boat to drift in close to a shoal. As I dug out a sandwich I failed to notice I had left my silver Williams Wobbler dangling about a foot into the water off the port side of the boat. Suddenly a large splake ghosted out from under the dinghy, delicately gripped the spoon with the tip of its mouth, and took off with it. By the time I had recovered the rod, the fish had dropped the spoon and disappeared. That was the only one I saw all day. Splake can be maddening that way.
Once I came upon a huge, twirling knot of splake fingerlings under a set of floating timbers. They had obviously just been stocked and hadn’t dispersed yet. Curious, I put on a tiny, chartreuse jig and tried to catch one. The naïve fish readily swam after the 1/16 oz. jig, but they were very hard to hook: their natural strike seems to involve swimming up quickly from behind, then a ninety-degree turn and a tearing action right at the point of impact with the stern-most part of the bait.
I found myself replacing jig tails repeatedly and not catching any fingerlings for the first few minutes. Warming to the challenge, I eventually figured out how to pause a bit before hook set to allow them to get to the barb. Then I was able to catch them regularly. The fingerlings were a good size, about four to the pound, ranging from 12 to 13” in length. It was a highly entertaining afternoon, observing how a splake strikes. After that I used a stinger hook on my trolling lures and improved deep-water results considerably.
Maybe I’d better call Wayne and see if the ice has moved away from the shore at all.
Filed in Conservation Issues, fish stories, Westport
Tags: Ice Reports, Indian Lake, splake
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