Lake Ontario out of Oswego 5/7
Living just over 60 miles away from Oswego – basically a straight shot up Rt. 34 has me psyched! There are lots of great, diverse fishing opportunities up there. From jigging lakers, browns and Kings to fly-fishing browns, drum and gar to casting for bass and more.
My buddy Eric met me at my apartment at 5 am and we drove up. Today featured sun and south winds, though the clouds peaked through a bit and the wind shifted quite a bit. The fishfinder wasn’t nearly as full of lakers and Kings as it was last time I was out, though we still found some fish. Eric had a couple good hits, and we had some fish moving for the jigs, but no hookups.
My goal with the Kings/Lakers was to see how they are moving and how active they are relating to weather and wind conditions. I want to see how things changed from last week. Each day out adds another piece to the puzzle – so at this stage of the game, whether I catch fish or not is irrelevant, it’s all about gathering data so I can form some theories to later be confirmed or disproven. It’s my favorite stage of the fish-patterning process. I’m taking notes on the depths I marked fish at, where I marked them, what colors and lures we tried, what the wind was doing, what the sun was doing and what time of day it was. It’s not hard to pattern fish, but anglers need to apply themselves and fish with purpose.
After trying the deep jigging we moved shallower and tried some mid-depth vertical jigging. Eric had a solid hit and a nice follow from a good brown! We knew a lot of fish were around.
Eric is a serious fly-fisherman and after at least 2 hours or so of checking on the jigging, I moved us into a stretch of water I wanted to check out for spring browns. I’d seen many areas like this on the Finger Lakes and intuitively could sense that this area had potential. (After fishing a lot, you tend to develop a ‘6th’ sense!) On my third or fourth cast with a deceiver I had a follow from a massive brown! Before long I hooked up and landed a small brown, maybe 17″ long. The follows kept coming and coming – our area was swarming with fish and at times I’d see two or more fish. I hooked up again and landed a 23″ brown. We saw bass and drum too. The number of follows we had was sick! I had another follow from a massive 27″ to 30″ fish! Conditions were changing though, and the fish were getting spookier and less aggressive. Eric hooked what may have been a good drum momentarily.
We moved back out and tried the jigging again. We marked more Kings and had some move for the jigs, but the fish clearly weren’t real active -it wasn’t like last week. Eric had another hit. We then wound up with some more nearshore brown fishing- I missed one on a tube jig and before we finished up we tried the river (60 degrees) and Eric landed a nice bass. We also saw a few gar porpoise in the river. This river holds some MASSIVE gar and I’m looking forward to catching some later in the season.
All in all a very productive day in terms of knowledge. I am confident with my spring brown areas and know I’ll be able to get browns here for years and years! We’ll be back, likely in another 2 weeks or less.