Lake Ontario/Chaumont Region 10/29
After our great smallmouth bass fishing earlier in October, Mike and I were chomping at the bit to get back to Chaumont. The plan was to spend two days there last week, but things didn’t work out schedule-wise, so we decided one day in late October would be better than nothing.
Water temps were still in the low 50s – from 51 to 53 degrees. Air temps were very cold – we had temps near freezing as we drove up. The whole region up there is lifeless around this time. Very few cars driving around, next to nobody out on the water – it’s clearly the offseason in North country. It was sunny and fairly calm to start, and I felt comfortable in just a fleece, down vest and the usual jeans and long underwear. That didn’t last for long. We started around 9:45 am right where we left off last time. We tried shallow then worked out. Sure enough, our same depth range- 10′ to 12′ was best, likely due to the craggy boulders and dark bottom below us. Mike missed a hit or two that he was pretty sure weren’t gobies. I then felt a hit on a tube jig and set the hook into a large smallmouth. It jumped 4 to 5 times before Mike slipped the net under it – a 19″ pig that dropped my Tech scale down to 4lbs 11oz! First fish is close to a 5lb smallmouth! Mike then hooked up with a “Chaumont Dink” – a 17″ fish that was probably 3.5! Our weather conditions changed a bit and the bite stopped for us. Winds shifted and sun turned to clouds. We tried some different tactics but couldn’t hook up.
The next few hours were spent checking out some different areas. We found some promising looking areas and I might have had a couple light hits on a jerkbait. But the elements were bearing down on us – we had clouds and increasing winds and chop. I don’t think either of us have adjusted into the cold-water fishing mode quite yet. But we worked different tactics pretty hard till around 5:45 then called it a day. We worked out to around 25′ of water. My guess is that the majority of smallmouths are on deep (30′ on out) structure now. We weren’t able to fish any of it yesterday.