Reflections on Lake Ontario Fishing Season 2016

My reflections on Lake Ontario Fishing Season 2016 run the gamete of challenging to frustrating to just plain always having to adjust to ever changing conditions. Such was the 2016 season on Lake Ontario this past year. Everything that was assumed to be normal wasn’t and having to re-invent the wheel was. Let’s start with the month of June. As many of you know and for those who don’t, June is our typical trophy brown trout month. This year,2016, it just plain wasn’t. Cold clear water close to shore made brown trout fishing almost non existent to just plain impossible. You just can’t catch what isn’t there! So what’s a charter to do?

Welcome mister Lake Trout to help save the day. When clients wanted to just bend rods and catch some fish, we targeted Lake Trout. Not planning on having to do this, we scrambled up some of the laker tackle that we had on-board and put it down to capture lake trout. Most days they were fairly easy to catch but then again there were always those days that you really had to work for them. Our best items by far were large cowbells with either spin and glows or peanuts trailing behind while bouncing bottom and stirring up mud. On any given day lakers could be found from 120 ft all the way out to 200 plus feet depending on the conditions. Some days you could see these bottom dwellers on your fish finder while other days you couldn’t, even though they were there! After writing this, I’ve decided to break this report down into sections by month. Our next report will detail our July experiences along with some of its nuances and how we dealt with them to keep the rods bending.