Hammer steel while it is hot, right?

I sent an invite to my friend Adam (who is from Perth, Australia) to fish on Saturday but he got called into work. So we planned to get out on a midweek day. Everything fell into place quickly and I was hoping to show Adam some good Ontario fishing. He was also excited to learn how to river fish and float fish for the first time. There are not a lot of freshwater opportunities in Perth...and Adam has barely fished freshwater before. Sharing unique fishing experience is what I love to do a lot.

Things were looking promising today when I hooked and broke off a fish on the first few drifts, but number of fish were actually quite sparse and they were not very willing.

Still, this fish moved out of its holding spot just to slam a drifting crawler!

Michael was with us for a bit until 12pm today. He went exploring at a pool on the tail of this area and landed a nice 4lb fish. I didn't have a pic on my camera though. Adam hooked a fish but the hook dropped out after a short fight. We banged this pool for a while but not much was going on...so we moved on.

Just a bit downstream was a nice little pool, but all we could mustered up was a white sucker on my line. After they are done spawning, they will hit every drifted crawler in no time.

We fished a few more pools finding really tough fishing. Then we came upon a little nice undercut at a steep shoreline where Andrea hooked 3 fish on Saturday. I upgraded my 8-wt fly rod and reel a month ago and I was really hoping to test it out. We were fishing with nightcrawlers all morning and maybe it was a different pattern shown to the fish...a nice buck fancied an Estaz Egg and gave a good fight before breaking my 4lb fluoro tippet. I tied on a new Estag Egg and swung a few more times before a fresh spunky hen broke my 8-wt's cherry!

First steelhead on the fly! You can see the Estaz Egg attached to the roof of the fish's mouth.

That's all the spot gave up...so we made a longer trek down. On the way, we passed by some small holding spots...so we spread out to work them. My spot had a shaded log jam with a decent current washing into the log. There was a fish sitting behind a rock and I was drifting for that fish when a flash came out of the wood work and stole the worm. This fish was just hot! It ran immediately upstream, then shot downstream right into the fallen tree before I could even react. Somehow, my 4lb leader stayed intact and the fish sat in the slack water under the tree. I got into the water and freed my line briefly before the fish wrapped me around another branch. I freed it once more and somehow managed to pull the fish out. Nice 3lb fish but unfortunately it was deeply hooked and bleeding...so it was destined for Adam's dinner. Perfect clean eater!

Adam arrived after I bled the fish out. I told him there could still be a couple of fish under the log. He made a number of drifts before the float went down and he was briefly connected with a silver fish. Too bad it didn't stay on.

We finally arrived at the spot where I want to hit.

I approached the head of that pool creeping on my knees. When Adam arrived, I told him to do the same as well. The fish were less spooked this way, and we hooked a few, dropped a few, broke off a few, and landed a few this way. Michael had to go by this point so he missed out on the action. The fish that wanted our nightcrawlers were all really fresh, silver fish. They were just hot and every one of them fought like demons and all of them took us into log jams. Luckily, Adam managed to get a couple of them out of the jams. But still, we broke off or dropped too many fish here.

Adam and I saw this hen shot sideways like a missile out of the log to grab the nightcrawler...it was quite a sight!

We almost lost this one to a log jam but managed to untangled the line off the branches.

At the very end of that pool, a big tree had fallen. Water was washing over that log and under the log was a nice deep cut. Behind the log was a deep pool. At the end of the deep pool was another tree leaning close to the water. Between the log at the head, and the tree at then end, it was only a distance of about 15 feet. This little 15' x 15' x 5' deep pool was black with over 50 steelhead!

It was an impossible spot to fish and land the fish though. I was calling Adam over to look at it and said "It would just be suicide hooking a fish here"...but the temptation was just much too great. On the second drift, my float was slammed down hard. "SUICIDE!!!" I yelled :lol:.

I set the hook, the fish sat there for a second before realizing it was hooked, then it jumped clear out of the water and Adam got a good look. He grabbed the net and said "I'm just going over that log and be ready with the net."

Little did he know the fish charged toward the log trying to go under it, but somehow I managed to stop it before it went under. The fish made a turn toward Adam and directly swam into Adam's waiting net.

We KO'd this fish within 10 seconds in this impossible spot. Crazy!!! That was the fastest fight I had with a steelhead of decent size.

After that fish, we hooked a couple more but dropped both. It was getting toward 1:30pm and we gotta bail. The fish, by this time, was exceedingly wary anyways and we called it a day.

I may try to hit them one more time before the run is over...they are just too much fun!

Steel factory

Too tired to write a full report after working a 12 hour shift at the steel factory. Yesterday was trout opener and we finally had access to some headwater areas where the steelheads were spawning. We mainly fished the pool for some hungry post-spawn steelhead. Most of the females were post-spawn already. Hopefully they'll be around for another 2 weeks. I'm contemplating taking a weekday off for another go at it. Yesterday, we waited for 1 hour for parking at 5am...people were already fishing by 12am and the lot was full by 2am as I was told.

Ken - 8 steelheads (lost a bunch to log jams and hooks coming out on jumps)

Andrea - 5 steelheads (not sure how many lost)

Michael - at least 4 steelheads (we fished apart for most of the day)

Matt - at least 6 steelheads, 3 white sucker (we fished apart for most of the day)

I fished with Andrea for most of the day. We did split apart to explore little slots, runs and holes throughout the day. He was lucky that every time he was hooked up, I happened to come looking for him (whenever he was gone for a while, I suspected he's hooked up, haha). I landed a couple of decent fish without any cameraman so I just quickly unhooked and released them.

I have a couple of videos of hook ups...but one fish ran into the log jam and busted me off...the other fish head shook on the surface and the hook came out. Again, every time I start filming, I lost fish...so I stop using the cursed GoPro. I may post the videos later...pretty sweet to watch me drift and see the float goes down...and the subsequent short run.

Just got to the first unoccupied pool, saw a fish resting in front of a rock...5 drifts later...BAM!



Then I lost one fish after another 30 minutes. We moved and after another hour, I hooked this one and handed the rod to Andrea.



As the water warmed up, the day got brighter and the sun came out, the fish turned on.



















Hungry fish...they LOVED nightcrawlers! Andrea and I only took one home. Most of them are still swimming out there somewhere.

Grinding it out in Virginia (Day 5)

There wasn’t too much to report on my end. I decided to sleep in since we would be driving back to Toronto. Michael woke up early to fish the morning low tide hoping to find a Northern Snakehead. However, he found none again but there were more signs of life at the warm water discharge. He saw some koi and hooked a possible goldfish. But by 9am, we really had to leave.

Our 9 hour drive was largely smooth going until we were near Rochester where we ran into some nasty snow squalls. But God was watching over us and we arrived home at 9:30pm safe and sound.

Overall, this expedition was extremely successful given the subpar conditions. We later discovered that other shad anglers were either skunked or caught only a couple of fish on Sunday, so our collection of hits, lost fish and landed fish was actually pretty decent. We were happy that the Chain Pickerel were quite cooperative and the Flier Sunfish were not very difficult. I was happy to find a bonus Warmouth Sunfish and even happier that Michael was rewarded with his first Redbreast Sunfish, Banded Killifish and a couple of 10lb+ Blue Catfish.

I’m already thinking about a summer trip back to Virginia to try for Flathead Catfish, a couple of micro sunfish species, and perhaps some more saltwater surf species.