First off, I would like to thank the weatherman.
Why you ask? Well, because he was smart enough when young and still in school to decide to enter into a career where accountability is not required.
What a joke this saturday was.
Seriously.
Weatherman called for 30km winds Friday night, dropping to 20km winds over night, then dropping to 10km winds in the morning, all from the north west. Instead we got 40km winds from the north all morning.
Brian and I launched second. The first guy launched in the dark.
Headed on out and set out the "lucky spread". Unfortunately in the 4 foot freaking waves, it was impossible to do much of anything. We actually stuck it out from 7:30am until almost 10am. It then became too much.
We decided either we were going to head back to hamilton, and go out of the liftbridge to the north shore, or we were going to head to dalhousie and dunk minnows in the channel. I let the guest decide.
I had a few dozen minnows in the live well, and CDP is only 4 miles from port dalhousie, but it was so nasty and rough we decided to head the 3 miles back to jordan and put the boat on the trailer...we'd drive over in comfort.
Once at Dalhousie we tied up rods and I showed Brian the ropes quickly. Not much to it. As I was showing him on his first drift, he caught a fish. We spend the next few hours catching a number of browns ranging from a couple pounds to ten lbs...
There were three other boats working the channel. Two boats were not catching, the third boat was doing well.
Here's a sample of our browns from Saturday. Glad the channel was active. Saved an otherwise wind blown scatch day.
When I got home Dad asked what the plan was for this morning. I check the weather (why bother) and found today was supposed to be calm. Well, back at 'er!
We launched 2nd and motored on out. Conditions were much nicer this morning. And as such, the boats were out in full force. 7 boats within eye sight, many more outfront of jordan and dalhousie. It was actually really nice to see the shoreline alive again.
However, the nets were not alive this morning. We didn't move a rod from sunrise to 11:30am when we decided to call it a morning. Spoke to three other boats all who only washed lures as well. I knew the crowds at dalhousie would be huge, so back home we went.
Once home I decided I hadn't had enough, and wasn't giving up that easily.
Decided to head down to the harbour for some afternoon action. The winds had picked up considerably, and from the east no less. Made for a cold damp run.
The winds were picking up, making boat control difficult. As evening approached, we did the pervebial "one last drift". Well, wasn't the luck in my favour....After a good long battle Brian slipped the net under my first west end brown of the year.
Like my previous trout from this area, it was beautiful. I'd swear the strain we receive in the habour differs from that of the south shore. These harbour trout are gorgeous. A quick photo and off he went.
No better way to top off the weekend than with a home town, backyard brown.