Fishing new water

June 23rd, 2012

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

Econobass - Lake St.Louis 2012

June 16th, 2012

I am fishing with my good bud M-A Barretti this year and today was our first tournament of the season on Lake St.Louis.  We picked #50 for our starting position in the morning and had to battle the waves from all the other competitors to get to our first stop.  Marc's Basscat Cougar ran TOP NOTCH through those waves and we were able to get to our first area quickly enough.  I hate making excuses for losing fish but I've had terrible luck with my fluro leaders lately. Trying a new type of line today was NOT a good idea.... My leader broke on my first hook-set which was on my first cast.  I grab another rod to cast again and guess what.... I break another leader on the second cast of the day to lose a second fish in less then 30 seconds of fishing.   To make things worst, my partner "Bar" breaks his leader on his first fish.  Leader testing was officially over for the day and decided fish straight braid from there.

As it happens so often, most of the fish we had found in practice were not where we had found them and we had to re-adjust.  We found them schooling close by just a bit deeper.   We caught a decent limit of smallies by noon and decided to go look for largies in the afternoon hoping to get an upgrade. The plan worked.... the only problem is that the largemouths we caught were only a few ounces heavier.  We ran out of time and brought back a disappointing 14.17lbs which was good for 16th position.

Huge congrats to my buddy Remi Laurin and Julz Tremblay for their win today with an impressive 18.83lbs.

Lake Champlain spring fishing

April - May 2012

For the past 3-4 years, we've been taking advantage of the catch and release season in NY since bass is completely closed in QC until late June.  I don't have any fishing reports but I can say is that fishing Lake Champlain has been awesome again this year.  Most of the bodies of water I fish around Montreal are all extension of the St.Lawrence river therefore we are constantly trying to figure the how the fish position themselves in the current.  Lake Champlain has very little current if any and it makes it a totally different type of challenge.  This year we fished the south end of the lake for 2 days and it was really interesting to see how much warmer it was from the North end.  You drive about 2 hours to find yourself almost 2 weeks in the future in "fish time". We witnessed the full spawning season from pre-spawn to post-spawn and tried to learn as much as we could about the spawning process.

Few pics from our numerous trips to Lake Champlain this spring :

 

 

I'm back!

June 2012

It's been a while since I have a posted a message here but it's never too late I guess.  A new site was in the planning but it didn't work out.  Who knows... maybe I'll find the time and inspiration to have something up by the end of the season.

Berkley B1 2011

Sept 24-25, 2011

This year was the 3rd edition of the Berkley B1. Having fished the previous two events I can say that Mike, Ben and their team were able to make it even a better this year.

I was fishing with Marc Barretti aka "Bar" again this year for this event. We obviously didn't put the practice we had originally planned due to my lower unit misfortune from my last tournament but we were still able to put in 2 full weekends confirming stuff and looking for new things as well. I felt we found something interesting in practice but needed more time to have it completely dialed in so we spent most of our time on areas that we knew well.

On day one we were hoping for a shallow smallie bite in the morning and never got it going. To our surprise we caught a 2.5lbs largemouth there instead.... It took about an hour before we decided to go deeper to see if we could get more bites. After few adjustments mostly due to the NE winds I finally caught a fish on the drop shot while Bar was dragging a tube. It was a nice keeper that got us pumped and from that point the fish started to come in the boat... In less then an hour we were able to get a decent limit. We only had 1 small fish to change and plenty of time to find it. We spent the rest of the day "runnin and gunnin" on our favorite and most constant areas and brought back a decent limit of 18.73lbs good for 14th place and a place in the top 25 drive-by weigh-in the next day.

We started day 2 knowing we were out of the race to win it but we still had a chance at a top 10 position. The shallow bite had to produce and it simply didn't..... The area I was fishing was very crowded this year and practice had not been very good on the flats either so we decided to do what we do best with tubes and drop shot. The results would've been similar to day one had we not dropped any fish but hey... it happens! We finished the day with 16.81lbs and dropped down to 19th place. 

Unfortunately, we weren't able to beat last year's performance but we'll take the top 20 and try to do better next year.

Number 13 : Luck or bad luck?

August 13th, 2011

Caro and I will remember this day for a looonnng time! For once, the lake was nice with a reasonable SW wind.... it's wasn't dead calm but there was a nice ripple that wasn't going to bother the basscat one bit.

I'm not really superstitious but Caro couldn't help to notice that we had 13 rods rigged and we were August 13th.... To make things even weirder I picked #13 to launch in the morning. I didn't make anything of it but about 100 yards from my first spot I heard a noise that nobody wants to hear coming from my engine.... I slowed down and tried giving it a bit of gas once again but the noise was back and even louder. That's when I told Caro it was the end of our season.... thinking my motor had just "died". We were almost on a spot so we made a phone call to the tournament director and asked if there was anyway we could still fish and they said that I could find someone to transport my fish in a seperate livewell or get someone to tow me back to the launch (which I ended up doing).

While I was on the phone, another angler (not in the tournament) was catching big smallies less then 30ft from me and although I was a bit dissapointed I was surprise to see that the fish were "on" in this area. When I got everything confirmed with the tournament director I started fishing the area thoroughly as I had no where else to go. The first fish to hit my wacky worm was my biggest fish of the year at 5.4lbs.... A beautiful smallmouth that made me forget about my motor for a few minutes.... Moving around with my trolling motor only, Caro and I were able to boat 3 more quality smallies in the 3 to 4lbs range. It was around 10am when my dad gave me a call to tell me he was on it's way to pick me up. Now I started thinking that I should've called him later but I didn't think I had a chance to win an event with no motor. With my dad waiting for me on shore at 11:30am I put the trolling motor to 100% and put those Demone batteries to the test. On our way back to meet my dad, I had a waypoint marked on the GPS and we just had to give it a try to catch our 5th and last fish. On the first pass, I got a nice "thump" on the drop shot but never managed to set the hook.... I wasn't going to miss it twice! The 2nd pass produced the fish we needed to at least have a shot at a top 5.

We got back to the launch at 1:00PM but we weren't aloud to fish after being towed so we had to wait 2 hours to weigh our fish. Unfortunately, we had a fish die at the weigh-in and lost half a pound for a total weight of 19.30. To my surprise, nobody was able to beat us today and we won the event for a second year in a row with #1 lunker on top of that.

I'd like to thank all my sponsors today but especially Demone batteries who didn't slow down one bit even after 1 hour of 100% power on my Minnkota. I was able to fight the current and make my way back to the dock safely.

St-Francis practice time!

August 6-7, 2011

With Econobass next weekend and the Berkley B1 in september it's obvious I will be spending a lot of time on lake St-Francis for the next 2 months. It's no secret that I love this body of water but I would like to find some BIG fish this year in order to defend my Econobass title from last year and do another top 10 at the Berkley B1 2011.

I was able to put in 2 days of practice with Caro and my brother Raph but it wasn't a big success to say the least. The objective was to find new big fish area and validate other spots from previous years. My stuff from previous years is still very good but finding new big fish is quite the challenge. I find the weed has grown differently in most places and some of my prime areas don't produce quite as good as last year but fortunatly the deeper water smallies are still locked down on my GPS and biting well!

I tried looking for largies has a "Plan B" and found a nice deep weedline that produced some decent size. I don't think I will be needing them but I can't wait to go back to check it out before the B1.

Overall, practice wasn't very good in the sense that I couldn't find any new stuff that I am confident to fish at the tournament next weekend but there is a lot of time left to figure it out before the B1.

Econobass - Lac des Deux-Montagnes

July 30th, 2011

I've had such a hard time on this lake in the summer that Caro and I had a simple objective : Catch 5 fish. I don't know if it's because we put the bar so low but we were able to get 5 smallmouth in 20 mins on our first spot. We were pretty happy about that because we knew that a lot of teams were going to struggle to get 5 fish in the livewell today. We stayed there awhile hoping to get one of the decent size smallies when had seen in practice but couldn't get anything much bigger then 2.5lbs. It's too bad because the fish were feeding heavily on minnows and were jumping on our Dumz sticks on almost every cast.

We then went upstream to fish another area for both largies and smallies and only got short bites... From there it was spot hopping until we decided to hit a main bay for largies and lost some more time there... I believe I was in the right area but probably too late when I saw how many boats had fished the area already. We decided to hit our main area once more before the end of the day and caught some other fish but could never upgrade any of our fish.

We finished our day with a mediocre weight of 8.95lbs good enough for 18th place. I can't say we are satisfied but it's an improvement over last years results nonetheless.

Vacation fishing!

July 18 - 22nd, 2011

It's no surprise that Caro and I spent most of our vacation fishing again this year. We spent 2 hard days of practice looking for smallmouth and largemouth on lake 2 Mountains. I know this lake has good smallies but it's also the most dangerous lake we have around here and I don't like risking losing my lower unit every time I'm out there looking for them. I was able to fish some new water but again the conditions made it difficult and the reward was somewhat interesting but too risky for the tournament, unless we get very little wind. I really wanted to concentrate on finding new smallies and put very little time on the largies.... Most of the largies are all in the same area and a lot of boats are fighting for the same spots. Practice ended up not being so good but we did find a few interesting stuff on the last day just before getting off the water that was promising for the tournament.

We were also on lake St-Louis, St-Francis and other local lakes for some fun fishing.

Here are a few pics from our vacation:

First time out on St-Francis

July 11th, 2011

I was back on the water today with Caro and my friend Aaron for what felt like a revenge for our awful day on the water yesterday. We had NW wind blowing at around 10kmh which picked up to about 20km/h in the afternoon.

We started fishing fairly shallow and Caro caught the first 3 fish with the biggest one around 3lbs. We looked at new and old spots but the shallow bite was not really working for us so we decided to go deep. I caught a nice 4.5lbs smallmouth in about 25ft of water on our 3rd deep water spot but we had a few good hits in the 20-30ft range. We moved quite a bit today and didn't have a huge bag at the end of the day but it was my first time out on St-Francis and it seems like the vegetation was much different from last year. I should be fishing it a few more times over the next few weeks and hopefully do better then today. Aaron caught one shallow in the afternoon on the spinnerbait and I missed 2 more on the tube. Caro caught the majority of the fish today as usual and we would've probably had a little over 16lbs which is not bad at all... but we could've done better!