Today we were joined by Tony, Rich, and Mark as we fished the Fair Haven Challenge together.  We headed out of the chute and ran East towards Oswego.  I set the boat down in 80 FOW off of West Nine Mile Point and the screen was just loaded with fish.  With high hopes of a finally having the banner day that we've all been so sorely missing on the East end of Lake Ontario this season we set up our go-to program.  But by the time we got set up and made the return troll back to our waypoints, those fish that we had on the screen had all but disappeared.  Where did they go??  As luck would have it, our first bite of the day came at 6:10 am and it was a huge fish.  The fish took a simple white double crush glow spinny/Sigg's white crinkle fly fished 70' down on our Cannon downrigger.  I had the rod in my hands and I can assure you that it was one of the biggest fish I've ever felt.  It stayed down deep the entire time we had it on, made several LONG runs, and took us out over 400', and that's on a mono rod fished off of a downrigger.  While we were hooked up with that fish we doubled up on one of our diver rods.  That bite came on a green double crush glow spinny/Sigg's Monster pulse fly fished off of a diver out 210' on a #2 setting.  Maybe today IS going to be the day!  We lost that second fish after a brief battle but then turned our full attention to the big boy that we still had on.  We played it for almost 40 minutes, got it right behind the boat, were just about to slide the net under it and then watched in utter despair as the fish we've been looking for all season long threw the hook and swam off into the murky depths.  To say that we were disappointed is a monumental understatement.  We were crushed, but we knew that we needed to get set back up right away and get after some more fish.

After that initial flurry of action we worked that area hard and managed another good hookup with another nice fish only to lose it to a broken leader.  We kept at it, worked in temp, out of temp, shallow, deep, slow, fast, and finally managed to boat a respectable King that took our blue double crush glow spinny/Sigg's Maui fly that Jay had just put down 90' into the 38 degree ice water we had out over 150FOW:



We headed to the weigh-in for the Fair Haven Challenge with just the one fish in our cooler, but we still managed to place 22nd out of the 74 boat field.  Had we been able to hang onto the bites that we had, we'd be telling a different story, but that's why they call it fishing and not catching.  Mother Nature certainly has been un-cooperative this year and she won yet again today.  All told, there were only three boats that came in with the 5 fish limit for the Challenge, and those boats fished out of either Oswego or Mexico.  Talk about a tough, frustrating day on the lake. 

That's about it for today's report.  We'll be back out and after it again tomorrow.  Let's hope things improve overnight. 

Until Next Time,
Fish On!

~Capt. Bill