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