Ice-out Steelhead pre-fish on Lake Ontario, ON tributary.
Posted on March 14th, 2011[nggallery id=428]I took the time today to meet my good friends Bill & Shelly Selby and joined them to explore a Lake Ontario tributary east of Oshawa. We are planning on shooting an “ice-out” steelhead TV show on Wed. using traditional drifting rods and centre-pin reels. Today was an exploritory trip to see if it makes sense to even think of filming on Wed. Morning temperatures were a cold -4C. When we reached the tributary it looked like just a part of it had opened-up over the last couple of days and a large section going down to Lake Ontario was still choked with large ice chunks and also still frozen-over with ice that must be over 12″ in thickness. We started drifting spawn-sacks under a float in the first open water stretched and managed to hook about a dozen fresh-run rainbows. The difficulty was that the water was so high and murky that it was tough to figure out where the actual runs were. We saw quite a few fish “pushing-water” and boiling on the surface and it looked like they were dis-orientated by the conditions. We are on for Wed. and we hope that the predicted sub-zero temperatures at night are in-deed trout. Otherwise, there will be too much run-off and the fishing will be really tought.
