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Wow, it is hard to believe! Especially when OPP confirms on their FB page: "There are no travel restrictions in Ontario"

In my 69th year,and still learning! Whenever i get skunked,I just chalk it up to anotherday of learning! And have a good chuckle!!! Fish lots,watch what others do,and listen to whats said! All a learning curve! Cheers!

Too bad you can't prepay for a 1000 gallons of gas?

I truly believe that once you believe that you've learnt everything there is to know about fishing, you might as well give it up! I am always learning in this great sport and that's part of why I'm so passionate about it and sharing with others! The challenge is always there and will be until my dying days! That being said there are those who I believe are very intuitive when it comes to fishing and are very good naturally, whereas the rest of us have to work at it! I still get excited when I believe that I've learned something new and can't wait to get out & give it a try! Next to actually fishing, my favourite thing to do is to talk fishing and I strongly believe that you can learn from everyone, even if it's what not to do! LOL

I do feel there are some true naturals, I've known a few, and for some guys, even with hard work, fishing will always be just drowning worms, that's fine though, this is a hobby for enjoyment, not a competition there are also guys who don't post much, if anything online, that can smoke those true naturals who post stuff

its a never ending learning process...thats why im hooked. Being a multi species guy I can basically pick and choose what to learn day to day. Luckily this forum and the people in gave me some fantastic tips and advice and it made my passion for the sport take off even more. BillM, Fisherpete specifically, i owe the both of them everything I knew to get started fishing smallmouth and musky. Theres still sooo much to learn. Last year i started flipping and punching for largemouth and it was like an entirely new window opened up for me. This year I think im going to have the jig in my hands a lot more. Its just something I havent spent a lot of time throwing, but i know it catches so its time to figure out the finer points of it. Tournaments are the time to throw the "100% know you are going to catch baits" likes whacky and neko rigs or a tube or crankbait. Sometimes you just gotta pick a rod up and make it catch. Those subtle feely things are what really changes the game up. heck dont even get me started on fly fishing...i suck terribly, but Its like an entirely different sport for me. I bloody love it.

seems like not too much has changed...i feel like the lake is so big that that is what specifically makes it such a great place. The fish live in their own world free from interruption and I am one of the very very few people that disturb them. Im glad to hear a double digit walleye does exist there, ive caught a 9 and the cottage collectively have caught some 8's so theres gotta be a 10 somewhere right? 6lb bass is definitely another target...hit 5.9 in October last year. Had my first five the year before that a 5.85 Funny the first fish over 5 I ever caught was almost 6! almost skipped 5 all together. I think ive naturally been fishing since I was old enough to be in the boat with my dad and two older brothers. My dad has a story from when I must have been 3 or 4 years old. He asked me one day as we were packing up the boat to take me and my brothers out walleye fishing on Jan Lake in Sasketchewan if I was excited to catch a big fish, I promptly replied oh ya we were gonna catch a huge one. So off we went and sure enough my old man hooked into an absolute monster of a Northern Pike that fought and thrashed and that he finally muscled into the boat and then proceeded to flop around violently scaring the absolute living heck out little me. The fish was definitely longer than me and possibly outweighed me lol. Eventually he got the thing unhooked and released it. The next weekend Pops was packing up the boat once again to take us all fishing and asked me once again if I was excited to catch a big fish and I told him definitely not lol! My first two memories of fishing I couldnt have been more than 6 years old, we went out on walleye opener with my entire family and limiting out on a 5 fish limit x 5 with my entire family in less than an hour. I remember the ice still being piled up on teh shorelines of the islands and my brother and I hiding under the tarp on the bow of the new glasstron from the cold. I think my mom actually stopped fishing and let us catch her limit for her too. The other was my brothers taking me perch fishing in our little tinner (I still run the same 1988 15 horse suzuki on my tinner today) Sure enough there i am 6 years old and a big pike ate my lure and the drag started screaming. I remember starting to cry and screaming at my brothers to help me fight the fish because I could hold onto the rod much longer and they refused and told me to keep fighting it. It eventually broke me off but I was really upset lol. Through my teenage years I hated fishing, my dad isnt much for anything but deadsticking minnows, and when we werent on his home waters in manitoba anymore, we spent trip after trip after trip getting skunked. Once we got the cottage in my early 20's i started playing around pike fishing using the tinner and in general enjoyed it. I even invested in a $120 shimano bob izumi combo that I figured was a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a fishing rod. As time went on I burnt out that reel, and made the "huge" investment of buying a $120 reel...oh boy the slope was getting steep and the surface was getting slick fast lmao. I then spent some time with some friends at their place on the tri-lakes and learned a bit about largemouth fishing. I still didnt really know what the heck i was doing but I definitely knew that i enjoyed bass fishing with them a lot. I think Bill M posted some photos on here of him bass fishing up on Georgian bay and i made the big mistake of asking him for some advice on how to target G bay smallmouth. Bill gave me some tips about Lures to use and how to tie leaders for various presentations. He gave me some advice on what type of structure to look for and i did a bit of studying on navionics. I headed out that weekend, got up at first light and went and fished a Pop-R topwater for the first time in my life. Needless to say those 3 smallies hitting topwater that morning changed my life forever. Tackle, rods, and a bass boat, fly rods, musky rods etc etc etc later...I dont ever see myself stopping until im physically unable to fish anymore.

Actually, I think it was a burp LOL

I was a lucky guy as I was born into a family that loved camping, fishing, hunting and anything to do with the outdoors, even my Mom was as much at home in a tent as she was in the house. I was born in November and the folks had me on my 1st camping trip the next June when I was only 7 months old. I don't remember starting to fish as it was something that basically happened as soon as I could hold a fishing pole and we always had a boat although not the one in this picture. This was taken about 1950 and I'm the little runt on your left with my brother and dad. Any of you guys remember the old flat bottomed wooden rowboats LOL

Not sure I completely agree with that. If I had a buck for every bass fisherman I've seen who say they're "fishing for pike" or "fishing for crappies" but are actually targeting bedding bass weeks before the season opens, I'd be a pretty wealthy guy. You get clowns in all types of fishing, it's not exclusive to any one group.

Long time ago, I still remember it quite well, just off Liverpoole Rd in Frenchmans bay, there was that dock to the east side of the road. Long before the Nuc power plant was built. I was 5 years old. First bullhead.

Like most, I started in my youth with my parents telling me what to use. They were bass anglers. So I learned that a jitterbug was a good evening top water bait. Well, I wanted to fish more then just at dusk so I would cast off the dock at my grandmother's cottage all the time. Finally my dad decided to teach me how to drive a boat, a tinner but still, considering I was still under 10 this was huge for me. When he felt I had the ability to dock it in the worst winds is when he decided I can go out fishing on my own in it. It hit up all the spots they would at dusk and had to learn how to use baits like a rapala, a spoon and or jig. It was hard for me seeing as I was solo trying to learn. Then my cousin up the lake and I would go out from time to time and I learned more. My uncle would come to the cottage as I got older and we would go fishing and he would show me 'his spots' that my parents didn't fish and I learned some more. Hell I even won a local Haliburton Bass derby with a HUGE rockbass the beat out some of the SMB weighed in. Then as I got older (teens) I lost the LOVE for it. I'd still cast a line here and there but I didn't care anymore. I forget how old I was when the spark light back up (I'm 46 now) but I would hazard to guess I have been back into fishing for the past 20 years but my fishing has taken on a new look. I went from bass only to adding walleye, musky, perch and other panfish to my game. I am still learning every time I pick up a rod and tie on a lure. Yeah there are lures you are going to catch a bass with like a senko BUT I like to try new things and try and figure out what that fish really wants to eat. I guess that's why I have about 80lbs of different soft plastics...

safe to say i fish a heck of a lot for bass and it took me 4 years to crack a nickle smallmouth. A lot of it is the body of water. A 5 out of some lakes is far more impressive than a five out of erie or simcoe for example. Much the same as a 5lb largemouth is a great fish in Canada but down south 10 is the target. Sure enough once i cracked 5 i all of sudden started doing it more often...fishing is weird like that. Thats the other thing, theres always a new PB to catch. Double digit walleye out of georgian bay is a PB i hope to crack some day. 6lb bass, a 50 inch musky all out of georgian bay...gonna be really tough to do them all but im sure in my lifetime i will.

He wants to know how far his drive will be to go crappie fishing with you. We all saw your boat. 😁

I didn't see to much wrong with the article, written by someone who makes his living fishing. There are plenty of fishing related things we can do without endangering anyones health, take me for instance. ..last week i changed the line on all 34 of my reels 3 times, rewired my boat twice and sharpened the hooks on all 9342 of my crankbaits.

So up until very recently, the Navionics SonarChart Shading feature only covered the Lake of the Woods, Namakan & Rainy Lakes in north-western Ontario! While I was checking out the NEW Navionics mobile app that now includes this feature, I discovered that most of the Trent-Severn Waterway from the Bay of Quinte up to Port Severn, the Rideau System, St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes are now covered as well! I understand that they are still working on more in Canada but that's a huge improvement! I've including some of the screenshots from my iPhone for different bodies of water now covered up here!

Kind of a vague question but one I'm sure has many different answers. I enjoyed fishing as a young child but never spent a lot of time doing it. When I did though it made me pretty happy and I didn't have to be catching anything to feel that way. I watched fishing shows and read fishing magazines as I got older, I learnt a bit from my dad and also friends, especially a neighbour who was a great fisherman. I grew up and in my teenage years my dad bought an aluminum boat and we would do some walleye and bass fishing mostly. That was short lived, sometimes teens have other priorities than fishing and soon after that the boat was sold. I can remember in my early 20s I would kind of nudge my dad once in a while and tell him about a good deal on a boat hoping we could spend some time out on the water again. I was also getting the itch to really get back into fishing. Unfortunately my dads health declined and he just didnt have the motivation to want to get back into fishing. He passed away in 2011 and I did what he wasn't able to do with some money he left me, I bought a boat. I did it because I wanted to get back into fishing and it was also an homage to my dad. I feel that's what he would have wanted me to do. I've been back fishing pretty steadily since 2012 and I can't believe how much I've learned and how much I still don't know. It's amazing to me how some anglers can be so confident yet so new to the sport and how some people can fish for 30 years and still feel like they don't know what they are doing. Do some of you feel that there are true "naturals" in the sport of fishing or do you feel hard work will always take precedence? Figured this is a topic that comes around every once in a while. This might be as good of a time as ever with a few extra ppl on their computers.

I think that might be clear water with a brown sand bottom.

I think in a way that it is with NYC being the epicenter in the US. It does show that with common sense things can be opened up and the entire state is not a one size fits all. Look at Michigan. They have a problem with the Detroit area but impose the most draconian rules in the country on the entire state. The UP ain't Detroit.

Thanks Bud, lotsa great memories in this old brain of mine.

Maybe one day after all this is over we can go slam some smallies. Those topwater bites are like nothing else.

Of course, this is an indicator of nothing.

Thanks for this Andrew!! I made sure to sign up and marked it in my favorites! Chrispy!

Here is what I got from my $$ guy. FWIW--- if it makes any sense Negative oil? The strange sight of negative oil prices after Monday's (April 20) late-day plunge in crude futures contracts has sparked a wider, cautious response in the equity market. A negative price for a barrel of oil may not make intuitive sense but is largely explained by the dynamics of the futures market. Oil prices are usually referenced by the futures contracts for delivery of oil in the coming month. As these contracts near expiration, the prevailing price of crude oil typically "rolls forward" to the next month's contract with minimal change in price. The price of oil to be delivered for the May contract is what turned negative. That contract expires today (April 21), requiring delivery of that oil. With oil oversupplied and very little storage anywhere, those futures contracts sold off sharply, with sellers willing to essentially get out of those obligations at extreme losses. With the May contract expiring, the June contract will become the prevailing price of oil, which is currently trading around $10 per barrel - low, but not negative.

ughhh...great photos man, maybe im a weirdo but I can literally smell and feel them. Early summer warm but with a breeze and the bottom one i can feel the cold dew.

I think that's really dependent on the year/river. Some seem to be all done and some seem to just be starting.

I see your battery life is all over the map too Thanks David.

The thing about stelheading it starts relatively cheap and that's why fishing will continue. Every year I run into 4-5 high school kids just fishing crazy on each creek. Just because you are old dog don't forget where you started.

I always wondered what your "camps" pb's were up in PAB. You were fishing that area in a much different era, I wonder if the fish were bigger then or now. The introduction of Gobies and zebra mussles really changed a lot in the lakes since then. My neighbor seems to believe the smallmouth are much larger now than before.

Me and 3 brothers, our 5 birthday present for all of us was an overnight fishing trip with dad for spring crappie, and all of us ran out of room for them the first day. My oldest brother never got the fishing bug and for my youngest it was an interest that came and went, for me and Mike it was a life long passion. Dad had friends that were very good fishermen, so we got a good start with the basics, and it was a different sort of deal hanging out and learning from depression era fishermen, catching fish for them at some point in their lives made the difference between eating and going hungry. An educational exercise? the competition, and the outdoors? All were factors to some extent for me, just never depended on fish for a meal. I grew up in the inner city maybe a mile from where my dad did, fishing was a way to get out of the city and explore. I had a lot of offers to go a lot of places to fish, just never felt a need to go to very distant places, it could be challenging enough to catch what was available closer.

Seems there is always something to learn in this great past time.

Yea, lots of wind here yesterday and -2 this morning. That damn March warm spell we seem to get every year now fooled me again! Anyways, Friday and Saturday look great to at least get the boat wet and check some water temps..

Reminds me of playing hockey. God just handed a certain amount of talent to some people. No matter how much I play I can never be better than some players at basically anything. fishing is much the same, sometimes it feels like the guys have horse shoes up their you know what. My one buddy dave is like that. He doesn’t take fishing too seriously, but he absolutely loves fishing. He always just seems to catch em. when you go up the ladder there’s just something to it for some people, the Johnston brothers on the BASS circuit are a perfect example of it. There’s a lot of hammer bass fishermen in canada but those two guys get in a boat and basically win or finish top 3 in any bass tournament in canada. You’d think that guys would just out luck them but they somehow just get it done every time. Proves there is far more than just luck to the game.

Well just speaking from my personal experience from two days ago on g bay, the craps aren’t anywhere near shallow yet. They are continuing to stage up out in front of their shallow spawning areas. Water is damn cold and aint getting any warmer with these -12???? Overnight temperatures and fresh snow on the ground every morning. Was 41 degrees on the graph on Sunday. so cold the fish were getting stunned when I brought em in. The small ones took a moment to revive even when lip hooked. May as well put the ice back on lol. Quinte May warm up a bit earlier than g bay, but I wouldn’t expect any craps to be even close to up shallow yet. i like the idea of the wooly bugger under the float. I was getting them this past weekend on a small buckshot in firetiger tipped with a minnow head. But I was fishing a float in 30 fow letting the waves do the jiggin and me focusing on just keeping my line managed in the damn 40kmh+ winds we’ve been having every single day.

Yep, that's in the Massassauga Provincial Park.

Is this not your boat ? LOL

As soon as a hundred people show up it's going to be closed, lol.

Not quite true. His wife had covid 19, two weeks later she was considered recovered however everyone that had been in contact with her should have been quarantined for two more weeks. However she and the kids went to the cottage, he properly self quarantined for two weeks, the children should have as well but they traveled with their mother to their cottage while we were being told "no unnecessary travel". I have been in self quarantine for 5 weeks now, I haven't seen my family in over three months, so based on your logic there shouldn't be anything wrong with me visiting my OWN FAMILY. So 20 minutes or so is alright, well it's only 3 1/2 hours to my kids place, I would be in the car by myself, so is there a time limit to No unnecessary travel? He hadn't been in contact with them for three weeks. It's the double standard I have the issue with, lead by example otherwise it's a dictatorship, everyone should follow the rules except me!

Squirrels = Rats that live in trees! I had a Red Squirrel move under the hood of my vehicle where it promptly ate all the fuel injection tubing! That one ain't gonna be back.

There you go!😄😄😄

At this point I don't believe a word that comes from the WHO. They have screwed the pooch at every opportunity with their "recomendations" And our leaders have followed their suggestions as gospel putting people at risk in the process. All along they have been parroting WHO talking points and not acting in the interests of Canadians. Thankfully they seem to have grown backbones and actually done what was needed to help keep Canadians safe, although in my opinion they were 2 weeks late on all of their decisions because of it. I saw a video showing how far a sneeze or cough can travel in a grocery store. It was quite a bit more than 6 feet. I wear a mask and gloves whenever I go into any store and use hand sanitizer all the time. The one good thing is out Premier here in the NWT closed down our borders to non-NWT people except for truckers and essential traffic as well as closing non-essential businesses, banning gatherings etc. Because of this we have only had 5 cases of the 19 all related to travel. All 5 have recovered so we now have ZERO active cases here.

If they do a live concert, I’m going to stay the blazes home. 😋

https://www.lakesimcoeliving.com/blog/hooked-on-fishing/muskie-love.html

No meat shortage here today. Felt good to cast again. buckshot tipped with a minnow head under a float. They are still deep and staging. Caught close to 20 perch too but we don’t get those simcoe giants.

I’m stilll going fishing 🤷‍♂️

Personally, i am going to say yes to fishing. I wont be breaking any laws by going, i will be going places where the launches are still open and the chances of seeing more than a handful of people are slim. If they close the seasons, or mandate i must stay home, thats a different story. But if have to go to work, as i am still deemed "essential", then i am going fishing.

I bought one...when I pulled the lever the boat stayed and the lake took off.