Quinte Fishing

Any salmon fishers lurking about? I didn't get out mutch last year and was wondering if the fish are still as scarse as the year before.

The fall run in the local tribs still hasn't come back up to the numbers experienced in 2001.

Hey Polliwogg,

The fishing out of Wellington last season was, sad to say, poor at best. I have a trailer at Willow Ridge and several of my neighbors are there exclusively to fish Salmon. One is, in my opinion one of the best in the area or at least I should say he constantly catch's fish - and he packed off his charter business to Bowmansville. (As did another operator I know) Most of the fish that were caught were caught using cut bait as well. It just seemed the cut bait out fished the spoons in a big way. Some nice fish were caught and it really doesn't take more than 1 big Chinook to make your day!

Talking with the owner/operator of "Reel Thing" in Wellington, apparently they stocked a good number of Chinook. They reared the Salmon in a pen (so they get a good sense of their "home" water) and released them at the mouth of channel into Lake O. This method also decreases the number of Salmon lost to predators and such - like when the MNR dumped the Salmon into the middle of West Lake.

Wouldn't you know it, the B.O.Q. comes back to the best fishing I've seen/had in years and - only to have the Salmon fishing drop off!! Oh well two years from now it should be great out of Wellington again.

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Good Fishing, CC Lad.

I do a fair bit of salmon fishing out of Wellington. Probably get out 4 or 5 times over the course of the summer. The last two seasons has seen a bit of a down turn in the fishing, particulaly in the size if the fish. I personally have not seen a 20lb+ fish hit the floor of my boat in two years. In 2001 I several over 20 and 2 over 30lbs. We still seem to be able to catch good numbers of fish (although I think numbers are also down), but the overall size of the fish has dropped siginficantly.

We fish out of Wellington on sundays as soon as the derby opens but last year we spent most of our time on west lake due to engine problems or weather. When we finally got out and cought one big enough to enter as luck would have it the tackle shop closed early. If I remember right Dad and I have entered one fish each in the last two years, but we did get a few nice size coho.

I know some of the guys by their boats and from the radio but I've yet to meet them in person.

Polliwog,
If your up this summer my handle is Bluebill. I am not a charter boat operator. Oh yeah, we did get one 27 lb fish last summer. One of the charter boats had one break off. We found the fish a few minutes later, floating on the surface, with the lure still in its mouth. Tried to revive the fish, but it was no use. The fish would not swim down and was barely moving so we kept the fish and returned the lure to the charter boat operator.

You can't find a better bunch of guys than the wellington salmon fleet, they'll put you on fish when they've never seen you before and now they retrieve your lost lures!

I'll be up because I live here, the polliwogg is a 1972 23' glasstron white with blue trim, she has a rod rack and usually a planer board mast mounted on the rack and 2 scotty riggers.

I'll loock forward to meeting the bluebill.

While were introducing our selves, the name of my boat is the Moose II. I don't really know why the fishing has dropped off in the past couple of years. Ultimately I guess there's less fish to be caught. The Rainbow's and brown catch's are way down and the lake Trout fishing seems to have move east (Main Duck's) There seems to be bait out at the shoals, the Bonnet etc. but no "hooks" to go with it.

Heck when I first started fishing out of Wellington, in early spring you could simply turn left out of the harbor and flat line with Walleye diver's and have great lake trout action along the shore.

Oh well I guess that’s why the call it fishing and not catching! Good luck and perhaps we will talk to you out on the water

Yeah I remember those days at Wellington. We would troll along the Sandbabanks and catch 15 - 20 Lakers up to 12 lbs in a morning in 5 or 6 feet of water on light tackle.What a buzz? Since the zebra mussles the lakers don't seem to come in shallow anymore. I don't do as much spring fishing now since I've taken up turkey hunting, but a few years back we were able to catch a lot of lakers early in the spring right on the bottom in about 125' on the North side of Timber Island.

Youy would think if any of those lakers survived they would be getting up there in size, is there a theary as to what happened to them? I heard of a lamprey on a pike from the picton bay this winter, thats the first Ive heard of them in the bay and a couple years ago all the salmon we cought had lamprey marks.

Word is there was a few herring around!