Tough afternoon on the River.

Hit the Upper Niagara River on friday afternoon.

It was super windy so it made it the only place to get out unless you wanted to be in white caps elsewhere.
Tried several marked spots of the gps with no luck on the drop shot, spinnerbaits, crankbaits or jerk baits.
Quinten caught a 12" smallmouth on a LiveTarget perch crankbait but not what we'd hoped for 2 hours in.
Wind picked up even more and we were going to bail then we saw a spot where the shore line out to about 75 feet was protected by a rise and a line of trees so we decided to give it a couple of drifts before packing it in.
Good idea!
First drift I popped my biggest smallmouth this season (well that got in the boat anyway) on the Xzone mini slammer #309.

A couple of more drifts produced 2 more and a 3rd spit the hook with a big time aerial show.

Quinten couldn't get them to hit his drop shot even though we were fishing 4 feet apart on either side of the boat.

Tried the deep diving SKL shad crankbaits with a ton of followers and dropped the slammer on top of them but they all of a sudden had lock jaw.

All in all a decent afternoon with my buddy out fishing on a sunny friday afternoon.

Cheers,

Scotty

Ontario Bass opener 2012

That 4th Saturday in June always seems to take forever to arrive here in Ontario for the bass open season to start.

It has now replaced the childhood anticipation of Christmas eve to now as an adult Bass Opener eve.

Hit the Upper Niagara river with my buddy Marc first thing Saturday.
Beauty day, light breeze with a few clouds and not too hot.

Didn't set the world on fire by any means with only 9 fish in the boat but I've had worse days.

I hit the first 2 of the day on a Xzone mini slammer 309 and a Strike King series 5 sexy shad
crankbait.

Once we found the right drift location we had a lot of short strikes grabbing only the tail.

It took about an hour or so and Marc finally broke his skunk streak of a couple of outings without a fish.

Smallmouth in that current on light tackle are absolutely the funnest fishing there is.

Hit a few more on the Mini Slammer and one more on the crankbait.

Just after noon the pleasure boat traffic picked up big time and some of them didn't give a crap we were fishing and only in a 14' 6" tinny and blasted by with big wakes.

We stuck it out for a while but after a couple of bigger wakes splashing in the boat we decided to call it a day.

Hope the weather and wind co-operate from here on in so we can get out 1 or 2 evenings after work local and either Saturday or Sunday to a destination spot.

Cheers!

Scotty

1st tournament under my belt.

So my first tournament is in the books.

7 Teams from the Hamilton Bassmasters and Niagara.
8 Teams from the CBAF Golden Horseshoe Anglers.

Friendly joint tournament with bragging rights on the line between B.A.S.S. and CBAF.

The blast off was awesome, 15 boats putting the pedal to the wood.
I had a big ole shit eatin' grin on as John matted his 150hp Merc and we hit 50mph in no time.
That was the fastest I'd ever been in a boat and the guys with the big 250's were pulling away in no time.

Met a great guy, John Scholl from the Niagara Bassmasters was my boater partner.
Beauty Triton boat, super knowledgeable, patient with a rookie noob in his boat.
Thanks for showing me the ropes and having me on your boat John!!!

Boated a quick limit of 5 on the tube (John) and dropshot (me) in the first hour and a half.

Rookie mistake #1: make sure you leave the bail open if you're leaving your drop-shot down while netting your partners fish.....big smallie hit it and it flew off the back deck to the bottom.
One Quantum rod/Shimano reel combo joins so many others at the bottom of Erie...or at least that's what John told me to make me don't feel like an idiot.

Moved around looking for some quality to cull out our smaller fish.

Hit a massive shore line of boulders and rock and 3 rd cast in burning a Strike King spinnerbait slammed the kicker we needed to put us in contention.
It whacked it about 50 yards back and I got a little too excited and leaned on it a bit, first big jump and the spinnerbait came flying back at us.
John figured I'd just lost a 5+ lb'r......I felt sick.

We moved out deeper to some weight points John had, landed a few more that culled out the smallest in the live-well.

Wind changed and started to blow on shore, we headed back in to work the transition between the sand and rock.
John stuck with the tube on the drop off and I was covering the huge rock flat towards shore.

I saw a chocolate brown smallie close to the boat and yelled for John to throw the tube behind the boat, bang it smoked it. Good fish over 3 lbs, culled out the smallest 2.8 lb'r.

We hit 6 or 7 over a 200 yard line but not the big one we needed to replace the one I lost.

2:29pm hit, time to blast back to the weigh in for 3pm.

We weighed in 15.69 lbs for a 6th place finish in club points.

Congrats to Gary Sanderson and Ron Covington on an awesome bag of Smallies and big fish.

Also congrats to Lori Knight and her boater partner Rob Campbell for cashing a cheque in Lori's first tournament, way to go!

Here are the results:

1 Gary Sanderson and Ron Covington 22.19 bf 5.36
2 Rob Campbell and Lori Knight 18.80 bf 4.18
3 Joe Kubina and Patrick Zajdel 17.64
4 Jamie Lang and Robin Gaspardy 16.25
5 Stan Spilarczyk and Jason Barnucz 15.75 bf 5.00
6 John Scholl and Scott Biggs 15.59
7 Dave Distephano and Lorenzo D'Altorio 12.12


As for the friendly wager between the B.A.S.S. and CBAF anglers.

Top seven BASS weighs totalled 118lbs versus the CBAF top seven at 109 lbs.

Bragging rights until next year go to the Hamilton Bassmasters.
I'm sure the CBAF Golden Horseshoe Anglers will be gunning for us next year!

Opening weekend in Ontario is only 6 days away!

Next tournament for me is Long Point bay, July 7th. 
Have the big, heavy flippin' sticks ready to do battle in the heavy cover.

Cheers,
Scotty

Entered my 1st tournament.

Well I jumped in with both feet, entered my first tournament taking place on the NY state side of Lake Erie tomorrow.
With their bass season opening a week earlier than ours we will be looking for that winning sack a week before I originally planned.

I will be a co-angler in John Scholl's boat out of the Niagara area.

This will the second 2012 scheduled tourney for the Hamilton Bassmasters club with a bonus attached...we square off against the CBAF Golden Horseshoe Anglers for bragging rights.

I have 6 rods already rigged, I've tried to condense my tackle down to a respectable size but that is not as easy as I thought.
You never know what the bite will be so you have to be prepared.
-2 drop shot / tube rods.
-1 crank bait rod.
-1 spinner bait rod.
-1 jerk bait / top water rod.
-1 flipping stick.

The weather will determine a lot and with the Upper Niagara available if it's too rough/windy on the lake then we'd better be ready for some largemouth on the river too.

I hope to be posting pictures of our winning sack of hawgs tomorrow, boasting of our team winning the bragging rights until next year....we'll see what happens on the water tomorrow.

Cheers
Scotty

2nd Annual Hamilton Bassmasters Spring Swap Meet

What a great day!
The turn out was great, 38 vendors/table and well over 230+ visitors.
There was a substantial line up waiting for the doors to open at 9am sharp.
Soon as the door's opened, it was ON!

The bargains were flying, haggling abounded and almost everybody left happy with either cash in their pockets (vendors) or a bag of good deals (visitors).

Everybody did a great job from organising the event to advertising and promoting and setup and breakdown and everything in between.

The club raised some good money towards our conservation efforts and especially for the kids/youth derby planned for Christie Lake Conservation Area in July.

I managed to sell 70% of what I took and only spent 10 bucks....it was hard but my will power held.
My table was pretty empty by the time Jason got around to taking pictures:

Thank you to everybody who participated in making this such a great event.

See you next year!

1st Annual Hamilton Bassmasters Conservation Raffle

Who wants a ticket?!?
Only $3.00 per ticket with 500 total tickets available....great odds!

Tickets will be available at the door of the 2nd Annual Hamilton Spring Fishing Tackle Swap, April 21st at the Sherwood Centre on Fennel from 9am - 1pm. (refer to blog post of March 24th for details)

Erie Perchin'

Hit Erie on Friday with my buddy Quinten for some early April perch fishing.
Launched out of Crystal Beach and headed for the "flotilla" of boats on the horizon.
We'd heard it was "ON" all week and hoped the blue bird sky's and fairly choppy conditions weren't going to turn them off the day we can get out.
After watching every boat around us yank up perch cast after cast and not getting anything we asked a fellow fisher what the heck we were doing wrong.
He showed us how small a minnow they were biting on and realising that 75% of the minnows we had were too big.
We decided to go about 250 yards further west to the second big flotilla of boats and start fresh.
We down sized minnows and I cut some Berkley power baits down to size to try and conserve minnows.
5 minutes in the new spot and I had the first 2 in the boat, double header on my line!

We landed about 16 including some jumbos with the biggest at 13-1/2".

Quinten had an absolute brute on and in the excitement horsed it up from 63' of water too hard and straightened out the fine wire hook on his pickerel ring losing it just deep enough that we couldn't see how big it really was....damn.
We learned quite a bit talking with other boaters in the crowded area.
-go with 6-8lb braid (we were running floruo).
-super light action rods are a must for the light bite.
-come with at least 150 minnows between 1" and 2" with some larger just in case the bite changes.

All in all a decent day, first "raccoon" tan of the year courtesy of the bright sun and SKL sunglasses.

The 16 fish actually filleted up in to a nice fish fry when we got back.

Hoping the winds stay down and we get another shot at them next weekend.