Lake Ontario Brown Trout Fishing Tips from the Fish Doctor

Here’s a simple lure color selector  that will help you catch more spring browns, and it probably won’t cost you more than 10 cents, if you happen to have a spray can of fluorescent paint around.

Fishing Lake Ontario for spring brown trout can be a challenge at times, especially when it comes to lure color selection.   Variable water color and turbidity complicate the matter even more.  Your favorite spoon or stickbait may be deadly, but if you don’t have the right color in the water, you’ll probably end up going home with a nice clean cooler.

There are some basic recipes for lure color selection based on water clarity, which generally revolve around the rule of thumb…, natural colors like silver, black/silver, black/gray, Tenessee shad, and others in clear water, and lures with more color, with some chartreuse, green, or fluorescent orange in the color pattern, in more turbid the water.  The more turbidity and less visibility, the more color, until you reach near solid chartreuse or orange colors.

That’s fine, if you can figure out exactly what the turbidity is.  If you’re fishing the mouth of a large river like the Oswego, where I do much of my brown trout fishing, the water is commonly turbid or colored most of the time.  If it has been dry and river flow is low, the water in the plume of the river mouth is fairly clear.  If it has been rainy or there is a lot of snow melt, flow is high and the water color can be quite muddy.

Look over the side of the boat on a clear, sunny day with a slight ripple on the lake surface, and the color of the water on an average day might not seem too turbid.   An hour later on the same day, with no actual change in the water color, under overcast skies and a glassy surface, the water will probably look more turbid to you.  Sometimes, it’s just difficult to eyeball this and figure out exactly what the conditions are.

To make life easier(MLE) for myself, and make my lure color selection more effective when I’m fishing spring brown trout, I paint one of the five 6 lb. cannonballs I use on my riggers in the spring fluorescent red.  This give me a water turbidity indicator when I lower it down in the water and check my depth indicator on the rigger when the brightly colored ball disappears from sight.  I call it my COLOR-SEELECTOR.

I have my favorite color patterns, just like you do, and have developed my spring brown trout color selection formula around a combination of what I see with my COLOR-SEELECTOR, overhead light conditions, and what the fish tell me after I put lures in the water.  If my COLOR-SEELECTOR READS(fl. ball disappears) 6-8 feet, and it’s moderately overcast,  I’m going to fish my favorite silver/blue Flutterdevle.  If it reads 3-5 feet, I’m going to fish a silver/blue/green Two-Tone Flutterdevle. 

It works for me, and for 10 cents, how can you go wrong?  The bonus…, if there are any cohos around, they love to snuggle right up close to that red ball and hammer a brightly colored spoon or plug 3 or 4 feet behind it!

A fluorescent red 6 lb. cannon ball, the perfect Color-Seelector for spring Ontario brown trout

Lake Ontario Charter Captain’s Vacation!

My English Setter retrieving a Hungarian partridge on the Schauer ranch in South Dakota

What’s a Lake Ontario charter captain do when the lake fishing season for salmon and trout is over?  Well, he goes hunting!

And that’s just what I did in late Sept., 2009, when I headed west with my English Setter, Bandit, to South Dakota to hunt sharptail grouse, prairie chickens, and Hungarian partridge on tens of thousands of acres of rolling grasslands and ranches in endless prairie country.

With experience scouting and hunting these great game birds in South and North Dakota, plus north central Montana in the fall of 2008, I knew eactly where to go…, the Pierre National Grassland, Grand River National Grassland, and the 27,000 acre Schauer Ranch near the community of Faith, population 789, in Northwest S. Dakota.

The national grasslands are a public treasure where hunters, have access to hundreds of square miles of hunting for big game like antelope, mule deer, and whitetails, plus small game, especially sharptail grouse and prairie chickens, collectively known as prairie grouse. 

 The wide open rolling grasslands are a mecca for hunters with wide ranging pointing dogs who pursue these wild, native game birds that inhabited America’s prairies long before the white man set foot here.   Visit Pierre, South Dakota on the opener of the prairie grouse season, Sept. 19 this year, and as you drive by the Fort Pierre Motel you’ll see a large sign that says, “Welcome Hunters and Dogs”.   In the motel parking lot, you’ll see pickup trucks with  license plates  from Maine to Virginia to Alabama.   

I spent several days hunting sharptails and “chickens” at the Pierre Grasslands, then traveled on to the 27,000 acre Schauer Ranch with thousands of acres of wheat and sunflowers  stretching from horizon to horizon, plus more acres of grassland where hundreds of black Angus dot the fields.  Food plots of corn, sourghum, and millet are strategically scattered through the property.  Doug Schauer, who operates Prairie Hills Hunting www.prairiehillshunting.com carefully manages the habitat for trophy antelope, whitetails, and mule deer, plus wild South Dakota pheasants.  Two of my favorite western game birds, sharptails and Hungarian partridge, are abundant there.   The hunting for “sharpies” and Huns this year was even better than in 2008.  Exactly as described on the Prairie Hills Hunting web site, I saw many antelope, whitetails, and mule deer while hunting birds, with no other bird hunters on the entire ranch while I was there.

My last stop this season was the Grand River National Grassland, my favorite grassland for sharptails because there are lots of birds and NO HUNTERS!  In about 10 days of hunting in ‘08 and ‘09, I’ve seen only two other bird hunters, and they spent only a few hours away from their vehicle.  The word for Grand River is remote…, it’s almost as if you were the first person to hunt there.

Lake Ontario Fishing Charters, Safety, Fun, Then Fish

Carol Angel on an August 1, 2009, Lake Ontario salmon fishing charter.

When it comes to Lake Ontario fishing charters for trout and salmon aboard the Fish Doctor with Captain Ernie, there are three primary priorities…, safety, fun, and, then, fish.

As the Fish Doctor departed the dock at 5:00 AM on the morning of August 1, 2009, with repeat customers Bill and Carol Angel and their kids, Will and Jen, those priorities were exactly what we were discussing.   First I was stressing safety, especially that the boat, with it’s twin V-8s was very seaworthy with countless hours spent below deck on preventive maintenance, plus a midseason out-of-water hull check, routine marine surveys, etc.    The nautical rule of thumb, is for every hour you spend fishing/boating on the water, you spend a half hour off the water or at the dock on maintenance of boat and gear.  Electrical storms and high winds with rough seas would be the only conditions that would keep us off the water, and those conditions hadn’t been forecast for 8/1/09.  Safety aboard Great Lakes charter boats is not automatic, and there are many horror stories involving poorly maintained, poor condition, and uninsured vessels getting into trouble and endangering customers.

Fun, the captain’s second priority, would not be a problem with the Angel’s.  I knew from past experience that they would have a good time no matter what.    They enjoyed just being out of the water and “getting out of Dodge”.  They were already having a great time before we ever left the dock.

Then, there’s the third priority…, fish.  What it boils down to is that catching Great Lakes trout and salmon is actually automatic for an experienced, successful captain.  That’s not to say that trout and salmon are actively feeding 24-7 or that a captain always can locate large concentrations of fish in every situation in 200-mile long Lake Ontario, but given halfway decent conditions, a veteran captain is going to put at least a few fish in the boat for his customers on almost every trip. 

Knock on wood, but so far in the 2009 season, after about 85 trips, the Fish Doctor has not returned to the dock with

a skunk in the box!