Started bright and early Saturday morning heading to Wellington with AD29 and Laker2011 to see if we could finally find the elusive Lake Ontario King Salmon. First catch of the day was us, by the fuzz for speeding down an empty rural 'main street' at 4am, not the best way to start the day. Undeterred we hit the wellington launch around 4:45 and there were already a few empty trailers along with a beautiful sunrise.
With no more speed limits and a relatively calm water, we floored it to the Scotch Bonnet
and before we had all lines in the first one fired. A beauty laker to start the day
AD29's new PB at 13lb 9oz I believe - he hit a watermelon spoon in running at about 50 feet.
No long after, one of the dispy's with a spin doctor and green hammer-fly fired and this time there was some crazy runs and a dog of a fight - we thought for sure this was the first salmon of the day, turned out to be Laker_2011's new PB laker at a whopping 14lb, 4oz. When clearing lines we discovered we'd been dragging around a small 2-3lb brown that came home for dinner, bonus fish!
Next up was me, down rigger fired hard I grabbed the rod - not nearly as big, but my new PB laker at 6lb 7oz I believe, he took the watermelon spoon too.
By this time the Bonnet was pretty packed with boats
and we tried some of the surrounding areas, with 180 degree turns that would make even the most seasoned "nauticians" dizzy, we managed a real cluster-fuss of a 4-line tangle with spin doctors complicating the wire-line disaster. Discouraged, but not beaten we spent about 45 minutes cutting and re-tying everything. Had the lines back out and we were headed back into the mess of boats just south of the bonnet around 11:30am. My weary eyes had no doubt when I saw the outside dipsy rod trip, this was the fish we'd been searching for all spring! With drag screaming AD29 had a hard time getting the road out of the holder. It peeled about 100-200 feet of wire out and the fight was on. I smashed about the boat clearing all the other lines and grabbed the net, nearly lost it at the boat - but the high fives were flying as we all looked in amazement at the biggest fish any of us had ever seen! Credit to AD29 for winning the fight, but we all took a pic with it because it was just such a beautiful, hard-earned fish! He hit a yellow dipsy around 50 feet with a tossed salad spin doctor and green hammer fly. 23-24lb, it wouldn't sit still on the scale!
Without much to keep it cool onboard, we only trolled for about another 1/2 hour - I hooked into a decent fish that surprised me when it rocketed out of the surface twice at the beginning of the fight and threw the blue/green spoon he hit. It looked to be either a large rainbow or Atlantic salmon, long and lean - looked all silver. 5/6 on the day left us all very happy and tired.
Can't wait to get out again!