AKRISONER

either that or you can teach me about fishing laketrout salmon and browns! Or heck, even both! A trip out is long overdue!

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.

update? what did you end up doing Chris?

supposed to be -12 in my neck of the woods, shes gonna ice up again lol second ice fishing season maybe?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Funny, I couldn’t afford a $50+ a week dart habbit either Johnny... damn I could go for a home made burger right now, but I’ve got crappie filets from this weekend to munch on for dinner. Gonna make tacos

wait until you taste how damn good filet mignon tastes again.

my all time favourite...the ontario government figured out a way to pay to give our electricity away lol

what about smallmouth on G bay...i see em in 20 fow lol

which to me is hilarious...totally different breed of human i guess. I could also go fish spinning gear and roe in my local river, but opt to get skunked mending flies instead lol

lots of hope that some restrictions will be lifted by July...i kind of personally believe that the July long weekend is the governments target for restriction reduction. I do however not forsee the large gathering restriction being lifted for perhaps a year or maybe even more. Depending on the size of your bass club, I think this may be a bit of a pipe dream. if the weigh in involves a crowd of over 50 people, not much hope! Ive personally given up hope on any chance of fishing tournaments this year. Im simply continuing to pray that i will be able to launch my boat and fish bass at all!

is it just me or are river and walleye fisherman consistently the nastiest poachers of all. I guess part of it is that these two species always have the tightest regs against them.

an update. Im still waiting on parts to arrive from the states. Canada post says they are due tomorrow. I originally ordered from yamaha in canada but they are shut down. I then had to go order from the states. I read lots online and everything recommended using high grade ATF so thats the plan! I bought a spanner wrench off of amazon but the fingers on it were too wide and i could not fit the pins into the holes without touching the actual Ram arms. luckily my old man has a grinder wheel. Ground down the wrench and tested the fitting and it works nicely. Now whats frustrating. I figured I would check the caps to see how seized they may be as everything online i read said that its common for them to get jammed up. I put the wrench in the holes and pushed ever so slightly and the things began to spin...aka my seals were not tight at all. The one specifically that is noticeably leaking being almost hand tightened lightly...no wonder the damn things are leaking! Ugh Oh well, changing the seals is probably a good maintenance thing to do anyways. The parts are already bought so it is what it is! Turns out I probably could have just tightened them properly and refilled the reservoir and been done with it. Ill update when the job is finished. Changing a couple of seals shouldnt be anything too crazy anyways. Im more interested to see how refilling the fluid goes.

lol used some old stelco language on me. What does that mean? Im not surprised you heard what happened. My dad had a crazy story about doing work in on of the furnaces when he first started as a junior engineer. Basically as he described it, the furnace was lined with brick hung on pipes tessellated together. After a certain amount of time the fire was so hot that the bricks would wear down and need to be changed. When that work needed to be done it was basically all hands on deck to get the bricks re-hung as quickly as possible to minimize shut down time. Every able body person worked the graveyard shift to hang the bricks as quickly as possible and then get the hell out of there. As he described, the work needed to be done so damn quick that they actually wore large blocks of wood on their feet that the soaked in water to insulate their feet and keep their shoes from lighting on fire. He said his feet smoked when he walked. Well in my old man went to work when suddenly he realized he was beginning to feel faint. He says all he remembers is thinking, holy crap if i faint and land on this floor, im dead. Thats the last thing he remembers. He woke up in the hospital. his co workers described that they began to see him run and then he dove off of a 6 foot platform down onto a concrete floor below the furnace floor. He walked away basically unscathed. Turns out he had gotten food poisoning from the mess hall after they provided them all dinner before their work for the night. They were eating the leftovers from the day shift. A mixture of that hot environment and the sudden onset of food poisoning nearly did him in. I feel like I am safe assuming that this kind of crazy dangerous work doesnt occur anymore.

Uncut Gems on Netflix was very very good. Its a rollercoaster and makes you feel really uncomfortable. Thats what makes it awesome. The girlfriend and I have dove into The Wire...we didnt like it for the first 5 episodes and then all of a sudden we realized what the heck was going on...and weve been hooked ever since.

Ya I think I would try and stink them out and hope she moves them. youll feel far more guilty if you handle them and she rejects them and leaves them to starve to death. A sudden death would be more humane for them then.

Lol sale needs to chill a bit. I got their email offering huge discounts on clothing along with the deal on fishing gear. They even specifically referenced heavy discounts on Simms gear and apparel. I was intrigued and then had to laugh when only clearance xxxl items were actually on sale with the rest of the stuff or anything worth purchasing (and this includes just plain t shirts) was available only in store. don’t advertise that you are doing a “Simms sale” and then make anything that you actually have in stock “only available in store” the original fishing sale was pretty decent, I think the issue with the megabass stuff is that they actually don’t keep any stock in their warehouse In quebec because they are allotted a minimal amount of their lures etc. they would then distribute the product out to their stores and it basically sells out over the course of a fishing season. It’s apparent that these sales are just them making an attempt to liquidate absolutely everything that is tied up in their warehouse. best deal I found was simply on yamamaoto senkos. You’ll never find them cheaper anywhere but they sell out fassssst

As with most things, the cottage angle has a lot to do with supply chain and available resources. The average cottager is not the type that can sneakily head to the lake and be self sufficient. The average cottager in my parts and I would obviously assume in muskoka (I have a friend that fits directly into this category) needs help getting their boat out of a marina’s winter storage. They need help getting their boat running again, they need help having their docks put back in in the spring, they buy their boats gas at a marina, they have a plumber empty their pipes in the fall and shut their water off etc etc, you get my point. The last thing you’d want the government to do is to tell these people that it’s a good idea for them to flock up north to hang out and buy up all of the groceries in the local grocery store. or even better, start partying like they always do, going island to island getting drunk. I am “next door” to “the moorings” in pointe au baril. The owner Brian called me When the order came from the government to shut down marinas he was actually somewhat thankful because the decision was now out of his hands. He was feeling immense pressure from island cottagers for him to open for business and allow them to come and use his property as normal. Brian and his wife are over 70 years old. On one hand he of course would like to make the income that he makes from his marina, on the other hand he realized the danger of the entire scenario and was not sure how he could manage to keep his docks clean and provide the required safety measures that would be needed by himself, while also keeping him and his wife safe. I even asked him what his thoughts on me simply launching my boat using his driveway without using his docks or touching anything on his property and having someone drive my truck away, and his reply was that while he understood how I could do it without posing any danger but the pressure he was feeling from island residents was too strong and therefore I wouldn’t be able to launch. One can appreciate that without the government shutting marinas down the owners are then required to make life and death decisions for people. That is wild.

Anyone passing by me in a boat at closer than 6 feet while I’m fishing is getting more than coronavirus from me lol

Interesting because up in my parts it’s as quiet as I’ve ever seen it. i think in large part that can be attributed to the fact that a huge portion of the cottages in pointe au baril are owned by Americans. with the marinas closed, I went out into a commonly travelled area and saw 1 boat in 3 hours on a Saturday afternoon. It’s crazy quiet.