Montreal fishing spots

Montreal fishing spots

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Fishing for bass and pike in the St Lawrence River


After a slow day with the Spro frogs, we decided to attempt drop shot fishing with live minnows.
The day didn't start off too well, all the stores I tried were out of medium and large minnows, so we picked up some worms and Gulps to try instead.

On the way out we stopped for ice at a local gas station, and bumped into legendary musky guide (and friend) Mike Lazarus. Turns out he found a way to keep the weeds of his musky lures by placing a shredded pvc tube above his leaders. I found that quite interesting, especially after we just ran into all the weed trouble a couple days before, he's been catching monster muskies as usual. His parting tip was that "it's still hard work, not just sitting back and drinking beer". I guess he figured out what we're about...

We started off by catching some small perch to use for bait, as I’ve had some success catching pike and smallmouth bass on live perch, they are also legal to use as bait in the Ontario portion of the St Lawrence River. The fish didn’t co-operate at all, we didn’t even get one hit. We eventually decided to try around an island that I know has lots of pike, unfortunately it is still overgrown with weeds which made fishing with live bait impossible. We switched to lures, I got a nice hookup within a couple minutes, casting a CD 11 Rapala Countdown. Turned out to be a 30 inch pike, that swallowed the lure all the way into it’s gullet. It was already bleeding from the gills when I landed it, I needed jaw spreaders to free the lure, as the fish trashed and bled out all over the boat. Needless to say, I didn’t bother releasing it. We had to head back early, so we packed it in after another hour or so of casting.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Phil,

It's a real pleasure reading your posts, they've been so helpful to me learning local fish habits and finding spots around Montreal as I have recently come from Europe.

Thank you so much.
Ilian

Freshwater Phil said...

Glad to hear I helped with your transition from Europe, I hope you enjoy fishing in Canada.