I’m looking back over the last several weeks and reflecting on just how good the Lake Ontario salmon fishing has been. On most days it has been stellar with some very huge salmon coming to the net. But, there seems to be a difference this year. The king salmon have been very particular on what they want to eat from day to day. There seems to be more days than not when the kings will only bite on meat offerings such as cut bait and whole bait. Yet, at other times they will absolutely turn their noses up at the meat and only bite flies or spoons. Why is this?
We have been talking about this on the docks among some of the top charter boat operators to come up with some kind of reasoning for this phenomenon. The general consensus seems to be that it has to do with water clarity and how deep the preferred temperature is in the water column. Could the zebra and quagga mussels be filtering out the water so much as to make the water that much clearer allowing light to penetrate deeper? Or could it be that the temperatures have been much higher or at least high enough in the water column where the fish can see better?
In any event we have been putting out a full smorgasbord of offerings to the fish to see what they prefer on a day to day basis and let the fish tell us what they want to eat that day. We then will load up up on the preferred offering to increase bites.