bucketmouths

The blog has grown cold. Cobwebs have gathered in the digital corners of the site leaving many, including myself, sad. What the hell happened? After all I was on a role with my outings… Well, life happened, as a matter of fact. Project schedules at work, family time, etc.. Things seem to have piled up leaving little to no time for me to continue my explorations of the Wilds of Ontario. I know, boo hoo, first world problems…

Thankfully there is always bass opener. I’m pretty sure it would take a category 5 hurricane to keep me from participating in this, the holiest of holies, Bassmass! With Schedules on hold, and a solid morning carved away from any commitment, I found myself and two others headed to Loughborough Lake for some greenback action. My compadres were Dave, a regular here on WOO, and Jamie, a beginner fisherman who made his debut on the fishing scene with an 18lb rainbow trout. Talk about beginners luck! Jamie had never caught a largemouth bass prior to our trip and was eager to explore what all the fuss was about.

Loughborough was an obvious choice for a first bass outing: no tournaments there to my knowledge, great habitat for both small and largemouth bass, lots of water to cover, and the right orientation to take advantage of the southwesterly wind we expected that day.

We fished the eastern basin heading from the centre east and immediately were met with action. As luck would have it, Jamie’s Beggineer’s luck streak was still hot and he managed to catch the first fish: a healthy 1lber. All three anglers were soon into many more bass with the odd pike to boot. things had worked out exactly as I had hoped for Jamie’s first outing. Considering the conversations we’ve had since, It seems we may have another convert!

Bass opener was great. A little too great. In fact I liked it so much I decided to extend the opening weekend into Monday. Frank, another regular on WOO, was in town all the way from Pennsylvania, and was looking to target some of the local toothy critters. His visits had become something of a yearly thing but as of late, they seemed to always conflict with bad weather or my busy work schedule. The wind was up so our original plan to fish the St. Lawrence had to be revised. Big water + big wind + my small boat is not a good combination, so after a quick scouting trip to some sketchy launches, we decided to head to an old standby: Newborough lake.

After a tough start, we finally started to hook up with pike and bass.

Frank has been talking (and dreaming) and talking of connecting with a 10+ lb pike for a while now. This isn’t such a pipe dream for an outing on the St. Lawrence, but it is certainly a tall order on the back lakes around Kingston. We hammered the bays and weed edges with all manner of spinner baits in a desperate search for Frank’s elusive prize. All to no avail. However, on a long bomb cast into a weedy bay frank hooked up with what turned out to be a tank of a largemouth, weighing in at a whopping 5lbs, 1oz. Respectable for sure, and quite the catch considering we were fishing immediately after the busiest bass fishing day of the year.

This was Frank’s biggest largemouth to date, which left him happy. It wasn’t what he wanted, but it certainly left him with a smile on his face. I’m reminded of the classic rock lyric: “you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need!” Indeed he got what he needed, a big fish, just a bit less toothy than what he was looking for.

Cheers from the wild,

Albert

” lets get to work”

Figuratively, that is. My two co-workers, Dave and Jordan, and I had put in a solid 9 day stretch at work right through the first two days of the Canada Day weekend. You would think after 12 hours days the last thing we wanted to head to the office, But this was no ordinary office. This was the kind of office where your coworkers are your buddies, your clients are cagey bucket mouths with a temper, and the wages directly proportional to how hard you want to work and how good your skills are.

Thankfully we are good at our jobs, so the pay was good!

We left Kingston around 6:30, grabbed our morning coffee and hit Highway 15, my gateway to all things fishing.

Getting up this early on or first day off in a while was tough, bit we all knew what was waiting for us so we did it gladly. We had yet to decide on a lake and all had a serious craving for some bucket mouth action. and Since we had all heard of the monster bass stories from cranberry and dog lake we decided to give it a go. We had never fished the lake before and had nothing but our hard earned bass fishing experience to guide us. With that, we fired up the 40hp on the green machine and ripped down the lake. Didn’t take long to find a nice weedy cove and we were in business. moments later we were hammering in to green gold at every weed bed edge and every floating muck pad. This was the only way to relax after a hard week.

Fish were caught on every rig imaginable including wacky worms, texas rigged swim baits, crank baits and jig and pigs. Definitely a big shout out to Lunkerhunt http://www.lunkerhunt.com/ for making such quality plastics. Same goes for cotton cordell! http://www.cottoncordelllures.com/

Bass started small, and gradually got bigger. Things got interesting when Jordan hooked what he thought was the biggest bass he ever caught. Turned out it was a decent sized dogfish (AKA. bowfin). These characters showed up fairly often during the trip and were always huge.

Me with a decent little bucket mouth.

Lots of wildlife to bee seen on cranberry and plenty of ospreys.

Dave with a pig he dragged out of the shallows.

halfway down the lake we picked up a stalker who thought our boat would be a nice place to sun himself. I always love seeing big snappers swimming around. A true sign of a healthy lake.