I was fishing with my friend Bar today on the St.Lawrence River in Long Sault for the first time. It's always a fun challenge to fish a new body of water. We expected this stretch of the St.Lawrence seaway to be very similiar to the water we find on the other side of the dam but instead we were faced with different conditions. For one the current was much less that what we are used to.
By looking at the map, we decided to try an area with nice rocky/sandy bottom and started casting. After about 5 mins Bar missed a fish that hit his bait right at the boat. We were able to see that it was a decent sized fish with a buddy of about the same size. We marked the area and move along looking for similar structures. While I was looking around to find a nice bottom, Bar hooked into a 4.5lbs smallie that made his reel scream as if he was stuck on bottom. We fished the area for another 20 mins and decided to go try another section of the river. We struggled for about an hour when we found another small school of 2-3lbers. While moving around we found some protected bays that looked promising for largies and ended up catching 2 small ones that are not going to help us at the tournament in 2 weeks.
At that point we decided to drive around and look for areas of river with more current. We lost a few hours trying all kinds of spots only to come back to our original shallow water pattern and started spotting fish right away. We spooked most of them but the important thing was to mark the area for next week's practice.
All in all I think it was a good practice and I can't wait to go back to this beautiful body of water.
Bar with the biggest smallie of the day
