Our first day was a short one as we both had to work in the morning. We were on the water by 5:00pm and found a campsite 8:30pm. We didn't do any fishing this day.
There is still snow in some parts of the park:
On the second day we fished a couple of sets of rapids that we had luck on in the past. Unfortunately we didn't have much luck this time around as I only caught one brook trout. So we headed over to another "out of the way" lake that we had heard was supposed to be good for lake trout and brook trout. We paddled around the lake and started trolling. When we started to get bites we stopped trolling and I began casting a small bucktail jig towards shore, hoping for a brook trout. Sure enough I caught a brook trout on the first or second cast. The next cast I caught a lake trout, then another, and another. Within 45 minutes I landed 1 brook trout and 4 lake trout. None were particularly large (although I did miss a larger laker at the canoe). My buddy was still fish-less to this point. We kept this one for dinner that night:
The next couple of days we fished many great looking sets of rapids for brook trout with mixed success. We weren't getting skunked, but the action was not nearly as good as our last trip and the fish were smaller. The fish were averaging 10-12 inches and our last trip we probably were averaging 14 inches. I know this may see small compared to the "Quebec Reds" posted recently, but this is pretty typical for Algonquin Park brook trout. Most brook trout were caught on panther martin spinners, and I caught some on jigs I tried myself. Some were bucktail patterns, and I also was successful with 1/4 ounce jigs with a wooly bugger pattern I tied. We probably caught 6 brook trout each on day 3 and 4. We spoke to some fly fisherman and they said they caught "A few over 17 inches on nymph patterns". Wow. I think I need to dust off the fly rod in my basement and really learn how to use it.
We caught many of these guys during this week. Some were larger than this:
Some of the brook trout we managed up until this point:
Dinner:
We didn't troll very much on this trip, but I did manage to catch this lake trout on a silver williams wobbler. We trolled over a deep hole between a narrow channel and a large, flat bay. Another buddy of mine caught a lake trout in the exact same spot the year before.
Around this point we experienced some pretty nasty weather. We were rained on for 24 hours straight with strong winds and cold temperatures. On day 5 we couldn't break camp until 10:30am because the waves were too large to paddle. I find this pretty amazing since we were in a bay about 1.5km across.
Here we are getting rained on:
The must have been a pretty extreme storm a few weeks ago in the park, because there were trees down everywhere (still green). This made some portages pretty annoying because you would just get over (or under) one blown down tree, and you had to do it again. This is behind one campsite we stayed at:
Once we did break camp on day 5 we were pretty excited. The river and lake we were heading to was supposed to have some fantastic fishing. During the first portage to the river we met a group coming the other way. We asked how the fishing was and one of the guys said "We didn't do any fishing....they wanted to get to this lake early today" He seemed pretty annoyed with the rest of his group. Any boy, if he only know how good the fishing was!
We fished the first couple of rapids with marginal success. We maybe landed 2 or 3 brook trout each. We had another portage and the river changed. It was narrowed and faster moving. We fishing and we were catching brook trout on nearly every cast. It almost seemed strange to have a cast without a bite. The average size was probably 14-15 inches. My buddy definitely landed the fish of the trip with this 17.5" brook trout.
We fished as we paddled to the lake. We made camp and headed back out on the lake. We caught 2 brook trout in the lake, but we had some strong winds to deal with, so we decided to head back up the river we just fished. We had high hopes, but if you can believe it, we did not catch a single brook trout. This was only about 4 hours after we landed probably 20 each in 60 minutes! Talk about turning on and off like a light switch.
We had another cold night to end day 5. We awoke to frozen water bottles:
On day 6 we paddled more of this small river. We fished a few rapids with some success, though nothing spectacular. The river poured out into a large open area, with ox-bow after ox-bow. Anyone of you that have paddled in Algonquin probably have experience paddling rivers like this. It can be very frustrating at times as you seem to make no progress as you follow the endless meandering of the river. In this case the current was strong and we were enjoying the fact that we didn't have to paddle into the wind.
We stopped at a beaver dam and began fishing the downstream side. We had a flurry of action for about 30 minutes. We mostly caught little guys like this:
We fished a few other holes as we paddled along the river and most held some larger brook trout. We stopped at another beaver dam and my buddy gave me the luxury of casting at it first. 5 casts and 3 14"+ brook trout were landed. This was another 20+ fish day each.
The next morning we planned on getting up early and making good time to get to the Jeep back at the put in. We ended up sleeping in, but once we did get moving, we pushed hard. We made good time and were back in Ottawa by 6:00pm.
Awesome.
