Lake Ontario Oswego Harbor 5/29
Guided Rob and his son Robert for a full day out of Oswego starting around 10:30 am. The goal was to target smallmouth bass. Robert is 11 years old and enjoys reeling in fish but hasn’t been bitten by the “fishing bug” to any large extent; he doesn’t have much experience with spinning tackle either, so the goal was to have Rob fish and fly-fish and I would fish, hook fish and hand the rod to Robert to reel in the fish.
The day was very interesting in a lot of ways. In all the years I’ve bass fished Oswego, I have never hooked a walleye. Rob caught some nice perch with his flies in the harbor while trying for smallmouths. We saw some nice carp, drum and even a few gar swimming around. After about 10 minutes I had a hit, set the hook and handed Robert the rod. The fish fought great and didn’t come up. It ran under the boat a couple times and got off. We had a good look at it – wouldn’t you know that it was a nice walleye! First walleye I ever hooked in the harbor and I had to hand off the rod!
I got Robert casting in the lake and next thing you know he has a nice gar chasing in his Rapala Shadow Rap. A few casts later and he has a nice rainbow around 5lbs chasing in the Shadow Rap! Crazy! We caught some nice bass on tube jigs and Robert got to reel in a nice 20″ smallmouth. The bass fishing wasn’t great to start and never really caught fire, but we tried some other areas and picked up a couple then returned back to our first area and had a better bite. Overall we hooked double digits of bass, though a decent amount were lost during the rod “hand offs” to Robert. Fun, gorgeous day and the lake was gorgeous. Lake temp along the shoreline west of the harbor were 62 on top. We had 70 in the harbor. A few trollers were out too. Overall lake temp is still cold. Multi-species action around Oswego can be very interesting!