CLofchik

Miniature lighsticks pushed into pearl swimbaits. I finally found a use for those Storm Wildeyes, even the brownies were crushing them.

1) The last time I drifted the Humber & Credit rivers for Kings I saw a guy running through the riffles chasing salmon with a sword. A flippin' SWORD!

2) Any GTA river will have hordes of goobers exactly 22 minutes after the first pod of Kings show up (I've timed it several times)

Sure they hit in rivers, about 5% of the time, lol..

 

If you want some hard fighting chinnies, get out on the piers while they are staging, they'll be fresh and you'll experience exactly what a 25lb chinook can do.. Don't wait for it to be half dead swimming upstream.

What he said, ofcourse there's times when the fish are seriously running the rivers or inbetween pods of running fish when the piers fall silent. The lower estuaries of rivers are probably the most reliable places to fish, and as a bonus flossing them is significantly harder when they have some depth to play with so the hordes of goobers generally leave the stretch of river between the pier and first few rapids alone. Chucking wobbling or rattling lures in the deep holes pick up plenty of fish, but drifting a hunk of skein under a float just off bottom can tempt the most tight lipped of salmon most of the time. Plus the mud sharks in the estuaries still have some water to play with and put up a better fight than shallow pools.

Learn how to tie an egg loop and pick up some skein. Most trollers will gladly give up some skein if you ask, so boat ramps with a fish cleaning station are a good place to score some free eggs.

Cogeco in Hamilton STILL doesn't offer it until they complete their digital upgrades within the next year. AAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sure they do, it was free last week for seven days.

I'm downtown with Cogeco, not sure about the Mountain.

Had to go from Hamilton to Paris, to Brantford back to Hamilton Saturday afternoon, that was nuts. The old part of Brantford was under more than a foot of water from all the rivers that used to be streets pouring into downtown, hail lightening and I think locusts at one point.

Going back over the 403 bridge I did notice a pair of guys still on the river fishing out of a canoe, dang.

The answer is simple Rick. Make the lake fishing guys use fancy float reels and make them include that fancy reel in every photo. If in fact you can actually notice the fish instead of the fancy reel, then all is fair. Keep them or eat them. It's only the fancy reel that matters. Lord forbid if anyone caught a Steelhead on a Mitchell 300. How embarrassing would that be??

Bah whaa haaa haaa haaaaa

Just to clear up a couple inaccuracies from John et al's posts, at best 10% of stocked steelhead were ever clipped in a given year, even in the US that has a million dollar machine that can clip 10k an hour. In Ontario every clipped trout had to be snipped by hand which logistically makes it impossible to come anywhere close to 100% clipping rate. So just because there's no fin clip it doesn't mean it's a wild fish.

And steelhead have been naturalized in Lake O long before smelt, alewife and lamprey's and the St.Lawrence Seaway. They are much more part of the natural ecosystem than Atlantics ever will.

Nice shot of the adipose clip, only one with it's fin intact?

Baby Boomers are aging, and their children often prefer more nimble kayaks, or motorized watercraft, to the lumbering canoes of their parents. In addition, canoe making remains a highly seasonal business, which makes it hard to manage the ebb and flow of workers and inventories.

Ding.

More & more new paddlers are downsizing from large & loud gas guzzling boats to personal unpowered watercraft. But they're buying plastic kayaks instead of canoes. Cost and a low learning curve are attractive for n00bs who don't want to put in the effort to learn how to really paddle (how long does a canoe th'd last around here before the turds known as Sportspal's crop up?).

Plus with people having to work harder & longer to support a bulbous bottomless gov't the number who still have the motivation to get away for 10 day or even a week long canoe trip down a Northern Ontario river or Park is shrinking. It's a double blow against canoe makers putting out anything that can't be used by outfitters or summer camps.

How they can get away with implementing a massive tax increase like that I don't know. For real there should be a protest down town.

Happy Canada's Day...now bend over while we kick you in the teeth.

How rotted are they? A good sanding and hitting them with Tung oil might bring them back to life.

Gunnels aren't that hard to do if you have an adequate suite of powertools (table saw, router, planer & sander), if not you can buy them roughly made and fit them to length with a Skilsaw & powerdrill.

If you don't have a Skilsaw just pony up the $200 and have one of a half dozen canoe companies do it. Personally I'd steer clear of Beach Marine, he doesn't do wood gunnels, his prices aren't that great and their canoes are on the lower end of workmanship. Holy Cow Canoe in Georgetown or Hand Crafted Canoes in Cambridge do this kind of work all the time and are pretty good. Same with Nova Craft but they're a long haul from the Hammer.

Oh and use Ash or Cherry, for gawdsakes anything but Oak. You might run into problems

Noahsmarine.com in Toronto will have all the lumber, advice and stainless hardware you'll need. They even used to sell roughly made gunnels last time I was there.

Heh, they're already calling this the "WW2 Cup"

The French and Italians surrendered early, USA doesn't show up to play until the last 15 minutes of the game and the English are left to face the Germans.

Did Ontario/MNR/Feds seriously cut back lamprey treatments in the last 5-10 years, or are the eels benefitting from mussel cleaned water? On Lake O there's been a huge lamprey increase, Chinooks are 50/50 for scars, trout are close to that and even carp are coming up with scars & eels on them which I've never ever seen before.

Not good.

The stock temp is built into the transducer, you don't need the middle temp slot. You can however purchase a separate temp input sensor and use it with your unit (i.e. you use the transducer in a shoot-tru-hull installation, but still want accurate temp so you install an optional temp sensor on the transom)

Caveat Empor-- It has been known for Ebay'ing Craigslisters to replace a more expensive dual beam transducer w/temp with an El Cheapo generic transducer. To replace a 'ducer is almost the cost of the entire unit.

Heh, after paddling a canoe around Lake O harbours this kind of story doesn't surprise me a bit (well actually I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often). Atleast nobody was hurt, but I mean you can't really expect everybody to ALWAYS be looking infront of their boat, I mean jeez why do you think they put the lounge at the REAR!

This was put up in another forum a few days ago, not exactly clear but around the 2:20 mark a kayak is hooked up with a fish and a trolling charter boat (cruising over the feeding school of bass too, what the hell) runs into him with no one at the helm.

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As for the usual screams for more enforcement...why, didn't he have the required number of flares on board? Out of the three times I definitely was going to get hit in a canoe, two were law enforcement craft. Both times nobody was paying attention forward. More enforcement is meaningless until you actually get people on board that know what they're enforcing, instead of just treating marine units as just another patrol unit revenue generator.

A man who drove into downtown Toronto with implements including a chainsaw, gas cans and a crossbow in his car was arrested on Dangerous Weapons charges.

 

Officers arrested the man, who was driving an older silver Hyundai with a homemade box on its roof, during a routine stop at the intersection of Scott Street and The Esplanade, near the Sony Centre and Union Station, a few blocks from the summit site.

 

Toronto police Chief Bill Blair stressed that it is not illegal to possess any of the items found in the car.

 

"The law is the law — it hasn't changed under these circumstances," he said, referring to heightened security around the G20 summit.

 

"But quite clearly if an individual comes down into the area … and is carrying things that could be used as a weapon, that matter's going to be investigated by the police, and those items can be removed from that individual in the interests of maintaining a safe environment for everybody

 

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/06/24/g20-security-threat-car.html#ixzz0ruUPtIYJ

I wish I had an American university stuff my local hole with $2mil worth of fish every year...what's your catch % on N.Shore Chinooks?

in before cougars in downtown toronto

Chicken Deli.

I barely made it out alive.

Well at work in the Vaughan area i've seen:

 

Deer, coyotes, raccoons, possums, turkey and i've actually seen a cougar and not the dirty old woman kind...saw one around the intersection of King Road and Keele Street....

Wow, you've there what, a week? No wonder the SQ can sneak all those plants in with the horribly armed protesters.

I think the G20 closures won't begin until next Thursday. So you should be fine, regular crappy Toronto driving weekend.

Wut he said, there were a few peeps late to the church but they were all the one's that were being clever and coming down from the north of the city. Even with the half brain dead Jays fans (is that a pluck full of oxymoron?) just jumping from Gardiner to Spadina was pretty painless.

Thx all for your input, and anybody that lives or works down there during the week I feel for ya.

One of the more encouraging posts in this thread

Have to try there soon and see what happens.

All of the lakes SURROUNDING Head have produced for me, so I wouldn't be surprised if it had some decent fish in it. Then again I've only used Head Lk. as an access to get to some superb bass fishing and never actually fished it proper. It still sucks about no overnight parking, I spent a few summers running around the area with a canoe when it was Crown Land but as soon as it becomes a Provincial Park all possible public access to the place becomes closed. Yay for Canuckistan.

Cranberry Lk. NW of Head, yes it's surrounded by private parcels, however if you have the motivation to paddle, portage & drag a canoe to the adjacent feeder lakes it is possible to legally fish. Being young, stupid and having a desire to blatantly exercise your right to free water passage (while you still have it) helps a ton. Bass fishing is pretty decent.

I have an in-law wedding in Toronto this weekend. No probs, I'm laid back, I'm domesticated, just let the g/f freak out and do all the prep & planning, just tell me where to show up.

St. Andrews Church, corner of Simcoe & King downtown Toronto. Smack in the middle of G20 prep hell (literally, it's in the middle of the Uber 2nd Defensive Perimeter). Will that area be shut down to traffic by Saturday, and what's the best way to get there coming from W.Bound Gardiner?

I hear he has some great Atlantic recipes.

Beach fishing is very much in its infancy here, but it can be really good under the right conditions.

Actually, I think beach fishing used to be alot more popular 20 years ago, especially in the spring. Now anyone "serious" either fish rivers for trout or out of small watercraft leaving mostly goobers on the shore.

The strain of chinooks we have here and the length of rivers mean they don't start running until they are pretty dark, not like BC at all. It might be worth thinking about a small pontoon or bellyboat and fishing estuaries to get some space and unmolested fish. Until then you can practice your bigwater casting on sheepshead down by the Discovery Centre in Hamilton Bay.

Is overnight parking still verboten? I never fished Head much but some of the great lakes further upstream (either towards Cranberry or Fishog). With the new Provincial Park up there it seems silly not to have any access.

If it's part of a canoe route, call up the local MNR and they may have some older canoe maps still available. I wish they'd start publishing them again, or at the least relax their copyright so they can be distributed online.

Backroad Mapbooks are the best that are widely available, but they only have about 1/3 of the most popular portages labelled.

Or you could just tell me the lake & location and I could sort through my uber secret cache of topo's and canoe maps

Hey Fantino, how's Caledonia coming along?

Oh right, nevermind. But keep that $70k inflatable paying for itself dinging canoes in Dunnville for not having a working flashlight.

Anyone want to go halfsies on some waterfront in Mexico? Y'know, a real democracy where you can sit in a canoe (without PFD), catch some bass (without a license), smoke my cigar (without smoking bans or 1000% sin taxes), and have a fria cerveza and not be a felon?

I seem to remember a news clip from a few years back about a kid that was bit by a muskie somewhere in the Kawarthas. Can't remember any details of the story for certain, but I think it was one quick bite and the fish was gone. The kid had a mark, but no serious damage.

Was it the Kawartha's or Nipissing?

I remember that OOD from the 80's, guy was tubing with his daughter when a big muskie came up and bit her ankle. The one thing I remember is that the guy was a little annoyed with the half dozen guys who were knocking on his door wanting him to point the spot out on a map