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It seemed like a good idea at the time....
As my dad and I were driving east along the 401, everything looked perfect. The leaves had mostly fallen from the trees, the flags were pointing eastward, and the thermos was topped up with 25-cent McDonald's Senior Coffee refills.
We plopped in at the ramp in Picton Bay about mid-morning, and noted a bag of fish guts lying on the ground next to the garbage can. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, and you know why. We tried a short troll opposite Merland's where we have sometimes caught fish in the day in December, but without luck.
We motored east to Glenora and just east of the ferry began marking lots of "hooks". Not as many fish as we have seen in the past, but certainly enough to show us that there were fish about - all sizes and all depths. Winds were moderate from the west, occasionally gusty. At times it got a bit rough out in the middle, but we were usually OK closer to shore.
We threw everything we had at 'em - every lure, every colour, every depth, every speed, every presentation. Reaches, points, shoals, bays. Side planer boards, downriggers, flat lines, Fireline, Trilene, fluorocarbon. Snaps with swivels and snaps without swivels. Trebles, siwash, Excaliburs. Fish scent, coffee, beer. Cursing and swearing, pleading and praying. You get the picture.
Nothing.
We saw a number of boats, and didn't see a single fish caught. No nets in the water, no "crazy Ivan" turns as the wind blows you while you're fighting a fish. We saw one guy standing up and thought maybe he was playing a fish, but we concluded he was just taking a leak.
We went back to the Merland's - Picton Harbour area at sunset. Now the PLAN was to give my dad the long Loomis with the mono on the baitcaster, but before I realized it, he had grabbed the other setup with the Fireline on the baitcaster. "Be careful casting that thing in the dark ...."
Uh-oh.
I spent the next twenty minutes steering the boat with the trolling motor while de-clustering the biggest Fireline clusterfrig you can imagine, zig-zagging all over the water in the dark trying to do three things at once. What finally solved the bird's nest problem was taking a ballpoint pen and slipping it under the loops to free them.
We trolled our usual nighttime haunts to no avail. Two boats anchored on the weedline near the pumphouse caught nothing that we saw in the two hours we were trolling around, but one guy reported catching a single fish around sunset.
"You know, if you had to pick a great night to fish - just enough moonlight, the right amount and direction of wind, the perfect amount of ripple - this would be it."
"Too bad nobody told the fish."
We bailed around 8pm, and at the ramp another guy said they caught one fish only somewhere out past the ferry during the day.
"Well, at least we had fun."
"It's better than working for a living."
"You can say you had fun getting skunked the first time out for the fall season, but it won't be fun a second time."
"This always seems to happen to us the first time out, it's too early yet."
Anyway, we'll be back.
Cheers,
Pete [and Ron]
_________________
Self-unemployed and available for fishin' mid-week most days.
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