Time is flying fast and yet another fall salmon season of casting for big Chinook in Lake Ontario tributaries at night is now behind.
This year I went out on my boat 6 times for night casting, taking many friends with me and , for the first time, my son, who caught his first ever salmon.
The run was good this year with many fish being caught and many exciting moments to remember, especially my son’s first salmon and also first ever salmon fishing by my friend who recently moved here from Winnipeg and never fished for salmon before. On his first ever salmon trip he managed to land 4 decent salmon and was fighting and lost another 2!
He told me he would remember this day for a long-long time and that in this opinion salmon fishing is unmatched with any other freshwater fishing and can only be compared with saltwater fishing for strong and fast oceanic fish he experienced a few times before.
This year I got a great help in locating the fish from my new toy - Helix 10 Mega SI/Di unit, which was clearly showing pods of fish coming through on SI image, so we were able to cast more precisely to where the fish was located and get more hits.
The usual fall glow spoon favorites were working well for us, such as little Cleo ¾, Mepps Syclope # 3, Blue Fox Moresilda spoon , Moonshine etc.
Catching salmon during every fishing trip was like a bit of a lottery between the participants, as for example, on one trip my friend caught two salmon right away around 8-8.30 pm and then nothing until the end of the trip at 1 am, my other friend caught 6 salmon evenly throughout the whole trip, and I caught 3 salmon with my first catch being only around 11 pm. And it was something like that every time – someone was catching more than the others for no particular reason as the lures and retrieves were similar.
There was a day when my buddy and I caught 8 salmon during a trip and buddy’s friends on another boat fishing at the same time as us in the same location caught nothing and they were not novice. Go figure!
The most popular retrieve was medium speed steady retrieve close to the bottom, but some days the fish preferred mixed speed-ups and slow-downs incorporated in the retrieve so often you had to experiment with that (I am talking only about casting, we did not troll)
This year we experienced all the usual fun of fishing for night chinooks: screaming reels and long runs, completely peeled off line from the spool taken by a running big male, crazy fish jumps and broken lines and lost lures, and even one broken rod but that was broken not on the fish but when casting it snagged the boat side.
At the end of the few last trips my elbow started to give up and my old tennis elbow problem has showed it’s ugly face again so I decided that it’s enough with salmon this year and it’s time to switch to fall pike and walleye.
My fall salmon casting season recap
