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Hey Guys, When I last left off, the boat had been put away in her early winter slumber. Its almost impossible to believe that its been 8 months since I put the boat to bed, now it makes me even more sad because that means we are only about 4 months away from putting the boat away again. Holy geeze. The 8 months have provided some pretty decent fishing as the guys and I have grown as anglers, we have really started to dial in on the fish, our standard has definitely risen. We have high expectations every time we hit the water. I have spent countless hours working to get the boat where I want it, learned some things and had some scary experiences. So without further adieu I present to you once again AKRISONER's (AE-KREE-ONE-ERS) semi annual review My last thread ended with the boys and i busting ice to get the boats out of the lake. Winter came fast and furious, we had the earliest ice I have ever seen and not only was the ice early it was quality from start of season to end. That meant the huts and short rods came out early and the fishing was pretty darn good. with such good solid smooth black ice, i found myself itching to take advantage of it and build a lot of rinks. Fishing took a bit of a back seat while i skated on my own rink every weekend. the snow was relentless too, just a classic old fashioned winter, I was loving it. The fishing continued to produce I personally didnt have the greatest winter size wize, but I caught a lot of fish through the ice so I couldnt complain. It just seemed that when we did get a big one, it never visited my hole lol. Oh well I figured maybe that PB bass i had caught for the fall was making me pay the fish gods back for my incredible luck then. As long as the fish are biting, im happy. Sometimes you just gotta be the camera man, rather than the subject. Maybe I was also cheating the fish gods a little, because my mind kept thinking hockey. not only was hockey taking up a lot of my time, moving snow seemed to take over my life, it just kept dumping this year and for once it didnt melt, it just stayed and kept piling up. and then the temperature really dipped, we toughed it out, but as much as I like ice fishing, sometimes an uninsulated pop up is a bit rough to sit in when its -30 and windy, thank god we kept catching fish or I may have quit until the warmer weather showed up. slab crappie can help the mood a bit too. Finally i got a few fish that were pushing to the larger size of my PB Range. Nothing like some foot long crappies to warm you up on a really cold February day. My girlfriend tells everyone i tried to kill her by bringing her out in the cold this year fishing. Here she is doing her best mount everest victim impersonation. She survived, but the fact she got skunked that day didnt help my cause either...I still convinced her to come fishing with me this spring so shes not totally over it yet lol. with the general lack of size the guys and i set out on one cold but calm beautiful february day to do some exploring. This particular spot didnt produce any fish, but the smooth thick ice made it just a neat spot to set up camp and hang around for a while. with the historic ice conditions family day brought the opportunity for myself and my brother who rarely visits up north to do some exploring to areas we had never been on snowmobiles before. Needless to say, seeing the big water by sled was a really really cool experience. Who knows when or if we will ever get to have this experience again. Things also warmed up on family day enough for me to bring the kids out fishing. What a riot it was having my 8 year old neice and 6 year old nephew in the hut for the afternoon. They loved fishing with a flasher. its almost like a video game for them, and heck they even caught some fish! I think they actually adapt to this kind of fishing well because they are willing to do exactly what you say with 100% conviction. You say drop the bait they do it immediately, raise it up...yes sir! Heres Owen with the first pickerel of his life. as march came, the ice just kept getting thicker. this particular adventure for crappies, saw my gas auger break (the new jiffys are absolute garbage, buyer beware!) Back to the old manual it was...punching holes through 36+ inches of ice manually is a good work out I tell ya! not being much of a fish eater myself, I have to say, crappie as far as fish goes, is pretty darn tasty. I had never felt this way before but the idea of trying to catch a nice 10 inch crappie for dinner added a level of excitement to my fishing experience I had never felt before. I caught a perfect 10 incher and threw it into my ice livewell...only to discover half an hour later my fish had escaped back down the hole through the wall! I couldnt believe my misfortune. my heater gas ran out and it was damn cold outside, my holes were freezing up and I was getting very cold.. Absolutely freezing and getting very hungry things were looking grim as i continued to catch fish too small to justify taking for a meal. Sure enough this beauty bit my bait at the last minute, the feeling was somewhat overwhelming knowing i had just got myself dinner. deep fried crappie tacos with lime crema and cabbage slaw...damn I go could go for some right now. later in the week i headed out for a fish and once again manually drilled my holes (stupid jiffy was still getting fixed) but was greeted with a screen absolutely full of crappie. Like shooting fish in a barrel, but dad swung by on the sled and watched me pull out fish after fish. His exact quote as he sat and watched me "now this is fishing" Things finally started to warm up, spring was in the air and the crappie fishing was awesome. Getting greasy, snagging slabs, Daves safari completing the look with the ice conditions being as good as they were, my dad and i ventured for the first time out on the sound for some laketrout, It instantly became one of my favourite ice fishing experiences I have ever had. We all became addicted to ice fishing lakers in one trip. spring also meant the end to hockey season. My team that I run has played together for 11 years, year round for 8 of those 11 years and never won a chip together, well it finally happened this year, after being pretty awful all season, a magic took over the team in the playoffs and we all played the best hockey of our lives for 6 games straight and took the True North Title Home! next job on the list was digging my boat out of its winter slumber for our annual bass fishing trip to the souther united states. This year we were returning to lake marion santee cooper SC. Digging my boat out of 4 feet of snow, things went without a hitch. minor details, swapped a hub on the trailer and we were in business, unfortuantely this year the fish did not cooperate at all. We caught a total of 4 bass over the course of 4 days, not a single one over 2lbs...caught some by catch, a close to 20lb cat fish, some chain pickerel, warmouth, shellcracker and crappies...but just couldnt find the bass. Sadly santee may be headed the same direction as many famous fisheries that simply see to much tournament pressure with anglers hammering fish on beds. Oh well the escape to the warmth was welcomed, especially with the winter/spring we were having. I remember one specific moment as we came out of the mountains of west virginia having driven since 6pm the previous day and pulled into North Carolina at 7 in the morning. We hopped out the car and the smell of spring in full bloom was almost overwhelming. A cool experience having not smelt nature and plants alive for the past 6+ months. a cool chain pickerel gator territory driving and fishing the narrow rivers and ponds of "the hatchery" after personally getting skunked for bass after driving close to 3,000km I sure enough got my birthday bass after all thanks to my niece and nephew..they are the best! my girlfriend craving some heat herself convinced me a trip to the beach was a good idea...who was I to say no? Off to Cuba we went...and me sneaking some fly fishing in every day made the trip very enjoyable I even convinced her to let me go out with a guide for a full day. My casting directly into 30km wind was definitely not up to snuff. I spent a lot of time not casting the fly rod, but a cool experience none the less, catching baracuda on the fly as well as spinning gear, and putting a beating on some snapper feeding the entire camp with fresh fish. I got lucky enough to cross path with two fairly large cudas that I ended up catching in 2 consecutive casts. dont worry about the nasty gill grabs, these fish were eaten by the guys at camp! I thought cudas were poisonous but what do i know? immediately upon my return to Toronto I had to make the drive from Toronto to Kapuskasing via sudbury and cochrane. How nice of the north to greet me with a nice May snowstorm to drive through for my long ass drive. Needless to say, this was a very very very long day lol as I got through cochrane and headed west to Kap, the snow had stopped and the sun was setting beautifully, and sure enough these two moose were standing right in the middle of the road, I had never seen moose so close without them scaring me to death and nearly killing me. This was a nice experience I saw them from half a kilometer away and got to pull up slowly and snap photos. Really changed my whole mood after the drive I was having. Back to Pointe Au Baril some big time boat work was in order. On a trip for pike, I was doing some autocharting running the Troller on 10 for a few minutes when my motor shut off. I wasnt sure what the heck was going on. It seemed to almost intermittently work? but then would fail? So my fuse wasnt blown? I headed home to investigate and this is the state i found my ground cable in. The POS plug that minkotta uses had caused my wires to slowly tear while vibrating causing an increase in resitance on my ground wire which eventually lit the cable on fire. That along with re configuring my electronics on my boat to add a helix 9 to my two 7's resulted in some long hours rewiring the boat, it was worth it in the end, i enjoy the work and the boat is running perfectly now. once the boat was back in commission i tried to get into some pike. Caught a few in the 30's but man the giants were just not there this year probably due to the crazy spring we had. this cheeky walleye came out of 4 fow on a new growth weed edge. The swimbait was only about 5 inches shorter than the fish lol and then it came....bass season finally arrived after what felt like an absolute eternity. I actually quit fishing at the end of May to build up my anticipation. I spent my time organizing my tackle, cleaning the boat up etc etc. By opener, I was absolutely losing my mind, luckily my third fish of the year was this 4.6lb beauty a new PB for me on the kawarthas. the fishing was tough on the sunday of opener with our small derby's winning bag not reaching double digits. It was an absolute grind. We got good numbers but just could not find any decent fish. I sure could have used that 4 on sunday rather than saturday lol. Heres Jake with the pathetic "big fish" sad indeed lol as is always, the following weekend brought about my favourite fishing time of the year, Zone 14 bass opener. I went up early and spent the friday re-organizing and cleaning the boat for the week ahead. Here is The Number One Sorcerer looking nifty. Opening day didnt disappoint, Jake was super late so we didnt even get on the water until 9am, but we quickly scooped up a 19lb bag, and over 30 fish with the average size being high 2-3lbs. Just an incredible day on the water. I even caught my first of two pickerel over 5lbs that day in 3 fow on a chatterbait caught another one in the evening as well...what a pattern lol a pike with some muskyish barring, i almost thought it was juvi tiger! hookset after hookset This particular evening I got onto a topwater bite for the ages, I ended up bringing in close to 17lbs of fish in about a 15 minute period all on the megabass dog x. Insanity These sunsets were as good as i remembered, minus the swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes lol sometimes you gotta trip flip for a few green ones too, with the flooding on G bay, go figure we now have a pretty awesome timber fishery for largemouth. Where the heck was I? Flipping 1oz texas rigs into timber for green ones on G bay, go figure. speaking of flooding, here is our yard on the lake side looking towards my neighbors. Not pictured, is the 3 days of my vacation week i spent taking out our dock cribs and re-installing our docks. My favourite part was diving 7 feet underwater to grab 100lb rocks inside a 4x4 crib. Fun stuff lol when the average size of fish is the example below..and the numbers are way way way into the double digits it makes for a good time to the point you almost get tired of catching....almost.... my bass thumb after 5 days on the water was telling the story nicely one final 15+lb bag was in order before the dock work began late in the week. The crankbait bite was absolutely on fire just another classic G bay day. over the course of this entire week I think grand total I saw 5 boats fishing? Only one within 200 meters of my boat. It literally doesnt get much better anywhere else in the world. the final sunset of my week of vacation was a fitting ending to an incredible week. Thanks for reading, until next time (approximately 6 months from now, probably just as ice season is about to kick off) Peace!

Hey Guys, Ive been on OFC for a couple of years now, and i feel like i owe this site a lot when it comes to growing my passion for the sport. The guidance and assistance from some of our board members, right down to making new friends has really shown just how great of a place OFC really is as long as you stay out of the hockey thread when the habs are doing well and the leafs are not. I figure rather than posting after every trip that I make, I would rather do an annual posting of some of the best catches my family, friends and I have made this year. So without further adieu, here is AKRISONERS (ae-kree-one-er) Year in review. The year started like any good year...on the ice, with learning how to use tip ups, and lucky for me the pike were willing all winter. Here was my first decent pike on a tip up. (CLICK THE PHOTOS FOR LARGER IMAGES ) where my brother who is not much of a fisherman, but engages time to time, showed me how ice fishing is really supposed to be done. This year i spent 4 weekends of the ice season on island lake...the fish werent big, but kept us occupied through the long cold february that we had this year. With news of invasive carp being caught in island lake, we thought tip up carp would be a hilarious catch unfortunately the carp didnt come to play, the perch nibbled the corn away but never took the hook. March arrived a break from the cold was due, hop on a plane, we are off to cancun! An 8 hour guided flats trip was booked, where i proceeded to hook into 2 tarpon, losing both...had a hit and miss with what my guide called a 25lb cuda in 2 feet of water...a bad day of fishing is still better than any day doing anything else. I ended up 1-20 on the day...such is life, i sitll caught myself a small saltwater pike so I was happy! Back home we headed and waited for the the May opener..spent a lot of time fishing ultra lights on GB trying to find crappie and only managed some bullheads, still good days on the water. Finally May arrived, with cold water and even colder fish bite. Still managed a couple of decent ones. The water was still so cold, this girl hadnt even spawned yet and was shooting roe everywhere. As June arrived, so did some warmth, and boy oh boy did the fishing pick up. I decided to take a week off of work bass opener, and lucky for me so did my brother. I spent many hours fishing, and many hours hauling in fish, with the arrival of some warmer water, the fish went into overdrive. with a view like this after leaving the dock bass opener, you just know its going to be a good day. its always nice when your opener plan, works out perfectly, 3 casts, 3 bass Then with the fresh smell of fish in my boat, i hear a crash...and bang, and i freeze...as i watch this big girl comes running out of the bush surely looking for a meal. needless to say, lunch was had in the boat that day...but sometimes theres nothing better than hanging out in tinner magic eating a sandwich solo adrift. best of all is sharing your passion with family though. My nephew with his first solo caught fish my brothers first topwater bass a pike caught, after the cottage owner told me to cast 1 foot to the left of his floating dock...i did as he told and came out with this girl the evening topwater bass bite was all of the rage though with spring storms, came stacked fish on new weed growth...during one windy late morning, we caught 25 of these guys in an hour, hence the grin on my brothers face with news of us catching lots of fish, the old man wanted in on the action...i told him to head to canadian tire and grab some spinner baits...he came home with a bag full of #2 mepps...to his disapointment these were not the spinner baits that I was referring to. But i asured him that mepps will catch anything...and so one day dad ventures down to teh dock to try use a mepps...Your old man will always show you some tricks...and not 20 minutes later he hauls this out of the lake on a medium crucial with 8 pound fluro. The House record is now my dads...for the time being...what a way to catch your first fish ever off of the dock. 41" wouldnt even give err the gill grab lol! a couple of weeks later, a trip to emsdale was in order to visit an old friend. 4 of us hitting a back lake in what we called the "wizard tinner" and oh boy were the bugs something else. 4 up in the wizard this slab sunny with a cleft palet made up for it though A trip to Buckhorn lake was called...with the years first big heat wave, 35 degree days were long and hot. Where i spent a quarter of the time catching largie after largie...but nothing big...and then the other 16 hours of the weekend tossing blades for skis...this is all we caught though I promised to return with a guide...but first more bass were to be caught on GB. doing my best impersanation of a 3rd world dictator the bass hunt was heavy and so was the heat. The largemouth bite was very tough to come by...i did manage my first 4lb largie solo...but since this is the only other bass ive caught lol As summer ended and september came, i began to get amped up for something I had been looking forward to since June. A spot in FisherPete's boat at the end of september. Pete promised me a ski, and after spending 16 hours on buckhorn in 35 degree heat tossing 10's lets just say the fish were long overdue... This day started much cooler, but with a bit of wind and cold weather, I thought our chances were good. Pete proceeded to take me to honey hole after honey hole, every spot looked dynamite, but the bloody ski's just werent coming out to play..i began to wonder if they even existed...until noon where i finally spotted my first girl take a swipe at my bait and miss...and not 5 minutes later pete had a big girl on but lost it just before the boat....at least something was happening! With news that fishing was slow with the annual muskis canada kawartha gathering, my hopes were getting shaky...if the pros werent hooking in...i might be in trouble. We worked pigeon bottom to top...and as the sun was coming down we began working top to bottom...5pm arrived...and my arms were hurting and so was my confidence, but i continued to plug away tossing the 10 and retrieving hard, when i felt what i thought was yet another massive clump of weeds, but this one began to pull drag!... My first ski! 38.5 With a new found energy and adrenaline...the rest of the day was a blur...and so 8pm arrived and our trip winded down with the boat launch in site, Pete decided to cast one final spot that we had hit on our way out in the morning. We cast the spot to no avail...when pete indicated that we were calling it a day. I decided to throw one last cast while he packed a couple of things up...when i got a massive hit, and this time she kicked...I knew i had a fish...but it didnt feel as big as the first...that was until she saw the boat...and i realized...wow this is a whole different class of fish....an epic battle ensued...and the old girl was tired...Pete being the true pro that he was, performed an epic surgery to remove a deeply burried hook...cutting each hook out individually, reviving and continuing to perform surgery...i dont htink a drop of blood was lost...the old girl came back to life much to my relief...not bad for my second musky of my life. 46.75 I still cant thank pete enough And so the fall came and the pickerel run hopefully began...we ventured out this past weekend in the new heavy frost and snow...and it turned out the eyes were around for our fun! Including off my dock at 2 in the afternoon! and another night biter...24! not too shabby at all for some afternoon fun we headed to one of my favourite spots for some casting...the weeds were still deep and alive, i knew a good pike would be in them...sure enough as a squall blew in hard and nearly whited us out...dave hit this big girl on the swammer the next day we decided fall piggy smalls was on order...the fishing was tough, windy, cold, and slow...not easy at all finding GB bass in open water...but our perserverance paid off like it seems to have all year long...when the fishing is bad, fish longer...the investment seems to always pay off and so my year of fishing is summarized...with a huge shout out to Pete for putting me on the fish of a life time...my families record is securely back in my hands, and shall remain that way for what i hope to be a long time Im not done fishing yet...but these things take a long time to make! Thanks for reading!