Freshwater sport fishing in Montreal, Quebec and Ontario.: Trophy fishing Montreal summer 2026

With quite a busy summer schedule travelling to fish regions outside Montreal, I've fished Montreal less often than I normally did in previous summers. Add my nagging shoulder injury, which pretty much has prevented me from doing much casting all summer, which led to a bit less float tube outings as well.

Luckily, the little time that I was able to fish Montreal this summer, was quite productive for trophy sized fish of various species, as opposed to numbers. After nearly 5 decades of fishing, these trophy fish are generally a lot more welcome than numbers, especially as I don't consume fish caught in the Montreal region. As well, they put up great fights, and make for some spectacular fishing pictures...

After kicking off my summer with back to back weeklong trips to the Outaouais forest, I had a short 2 week break until my next trip up North. Wanting to give my casting arm a bit of a rest, I opted to pre-bait one of my spots for carp, hoping to get some decent runs and land some big fish. After 3 consecutive days of pre-bating my carp spot, I headed out for a short evening/night outing, still fishing for carp.

Sure enough, the carp didn't disappoint me, and I managed to land back to back carp weighing 23 and 26 lbs. Being that I was solo, and dealing with a shoulder injury, I opted to take a picture of the bigger carp on my landing mat.

A few nights later, I took Alex back to the same spot, hoping to put him on to his first carp ever. Again, continued pre-baiting of my spot paid off very nicely, Alex landed his first only carp of the night. This time, the carp was significantly fatter, and weighted in at 30 lbs even. He definitely hit the jackpot!

With carp at this particular spot normally falling in the 15 to 25 lbs range, this season has produced some relative trophy carp for that spot, with the three biggest carp going 26, 27 and 30 lbs.

After my next trip up North, I took a bit of a break from fishing, eventually getting out to fish for muskies with my friend Mike for the first time this summer.

First bite of the day resulted in spit hook within seconds. We kept trolling a relatively quick speeds, and our efforts paid off with a decent sized pike, as well as a small musky.

We kept trolling, and one of the rods went off again. To my surprise, a splendid 26 inch walleye had taken the big musky lure at high speed. Not the intended species, but surprise walleye are always a welcome catch.

Action died down a but after that, but sure enough, with about 1/2 hour left to our short outing, the rod went off with the reel screaming. This time, I knew we had finally hooked into a decent musky. After a short but intense battle with the big fish, Mike had the musky in the landing net. The fat 47 inch musky was definitely what I'd consider a trophy fish.

Again, another few days fishing trip took me to Ontario, and after returning home, my casting arm needed another break. Eventually, I got my son Avi to come along to a small lake outside Montreal I have been planning to show him. In general, the lake has a healthy population for smaller bass, big ones are quite rare in the lake. With very limited access, we headed out on his inflatable raft for and afternoon/evening of bass fishing.

Avi hit the jackpot within the first hour, landing this very nice largemouth bass, just a hair under 4 lbs.

A few casts later, I hooked another bass in the same size range, but unfortunately, it spit my lure after a couple jumps. in over 400 bass we've caught out of that given lake, Avi's was by far the largest, as I've never topped the 3.5 lbs mark up until this point in time. We did manage to land over 30 other bass, but none were anywhere near trophy size.

After a couple float tube outings that were rather slow over the course of the following couple weeks, I ended up taking a family out for their first attempt at carp fishing. They had won a bid on a gift certificate I donated to a cancer research society earlier in the year, so I was hoping they would catch some big carp. Action started off quick enough, with 2 carp landed in the first hour. First carp smaller than normal, second carp was better, with a nice big humpback shape I run into ever once in a while.

Congrats to both of them for catching their first carp.

The following day, I took Zev out for a day on Lac St Louis with my friend Mark. Multispecies fishing was the plan, and we started off still fishing for a mix of sturgeon, channel catfish, and other rough species. We ended up landing a couple sturgeon, two big channel catfish, as well as a redhorse sucker and an eel.

Zev had never caught any sturgeon up until this point, and the big channel catfish put up a great fight.

Later in the day, we switched target species to smallmouth bass, Mark and I bought got into back to back double headers as Zev looked on, with biggest ones pushing the 4 lbs mark.