Lake Champlain United - Forums

Thanks Jim. Good reading to get my morning off to a sunny day.
Dick

x2

My personal best Champlain Salmon came many years ago. It was a weekend in mid spring. I knew fishing pressure would be heavy in the usual haunts. These are the times i go where the pack isn't. I studied some charts and looked for a new area to explore. Put in on a ramp I had never used,fished an area of the lake I had never been on. No one told me to go there. Mid morning I burried the hook of a mottled green mp6 into a 8.5lb screaming Atlantic. By far,one of my favorite days of fishing. It's a huge lake from Canada to Whitehall. Be brave and explore,it's called FISHING!

Thorny wrote:My personal best Chamain Salmon came many years ago. It was a weekend in mid spring. I knew fishing pressure would be heavy in the usual haunts. These are the times i go where the pack isn't. I studied some charts and looked for a new area to explore. Put in on a ramp I had never used,fished an area of the lake I had never been on. No one told me to go there. Mid morning I burried the hook of a mottled green mp6 into a 8.5lb screaming Atlantic. By far,one of my favorite days of fishing. It's a huge lake from Canada to Whitehall. Be brave and explore,it's called FISHING!

i agree.

It's hard to try new things when you have things that work like lures and spoons that catch fish for you.
you will find that the lures and spoons we catch most of our fish on are the same ones we use most often. because of this we don't give other lures and equipment a chance to prove themselves and by doing this we may never know what we are missing out on this also goes with where we fish and spend most of our time. i agree that it's hard to change but the rewards can by life changing.

Thorny wrote:My personal best Chamain Salmon came many years ago. It was a weekend in mid spring. I knew fishing pressure would be heavy in the usual haunts. These are the times i go where the pack isn't. I studied some charts and looked for a new area to explore. Put in on a ramp I had never used,fished an area of the lake I had never been on. No one told me to go there. Mid morning I burried the hook of a mottled green mp6 into a 8.5lb screaming Atlantic. By far,one of my favorite days of fishing. It's a huge lake from Canada to Whitehall. Be brave and explore,it's called FISHING!

Thorny - Well said!

As more anglers learn and refine the basics, they will be able to apply them anywhere and enjoy the success of being "different"

Sawyer
If your favorites are working. It's a good time to try your new ones because you know they are hitting. No risk. No reward.

i fully agree Rob. Thats what i was trying to say in my post
Also Rob you have a good point. A good time to try new equipment and techniques is when you know the fish are hitting.
Thanks Don

Salmon focus for me:

Looking at the subject line and this question.... I think back to early in the morning at first light is always a good starting point. However....When looking at the data from the LCI the larger salmon can bite all day. They post the times these salmon are weighed in. Most people rush their salmon in so they don't die in the in late June to avoid penalties for a dead fish. So this is really good data of when these fish are caught. I was amazed how many fish came in around mid-day and into the afternoon. Something I have always studied this data to get a better idea and dispel myths that the fish feed in the early morning (before 9 am) and just go to the black depths and take a nap. If someone crunched the data of the top ten placing salmon the last 20 years it would be an interesting chart of when these fish were weighed in by time.

So what did I learn out of this? Getting out first thing in the morning to catch a big salmon sometimes isn't the best strategy. I would like to but my schedule doesn't get me out till 9 am on the water with the kids getting on the bus. Those bigger fish are there and ready to bite mid / late morning into early afternoon.

As the sun is up pretty good we employ different strategies and colors of lures and put presentations deeper than the low light / low sun angle of sunrise up to 9:00 am. with shallower presentations.

Not an April Fools Day joke but opportunity!

I am trying to get the data from Lci to report back here when I crunch it for the last 200 top ten fish entries for last 20 years by time. I would break it out: Sunrise to 9 am. / 9 - Noon / Noon - 4 pm / 4 pm till sunset. 4 subsets of the data.

Ron, that data would be great and dispel the early morning bite myth. And I myself look forward to seeing it if you do "the math" on it. I do find that some of my bigger fish were caught in the 10:00am - 12:00noon time period, especially in the early spring. I believe that gives the water time to warm up a bit. But the late June data would be even more interesting to see and pick apart since "my theory" of warming water would, in most cases, be De-bunked. Too bad we don't have wind and weather data readily available (or maybe it is?) that far back to go along with the weigh in times. (ie:colder weather and/or a steady high north wind) I'm sure some of the Charter people WOULD have that data in their "fishing note books"....(hint, wink, wink nudge nudge, ya know what I mean)

i have all of my weigh in copies of my fish weighed in at the lci fathers day derby and basin derby and will look at them sometimes today. all were released so the times that they were caught would be accurate for most species. my thinking right now is most were caught between 9:30 am and 3 pm.

Fishy1, too put that in perspective, did you fish from 9 to 4, or sunrise to sunset?

I am focusing on top 10 salmon only over the last 20 years and looking at the distribution of those weigh in times. Not trying to say big salmon won't bite in the pre 9 am but over the course of the day instead. And this data from LCI time frame is the best week of salmon fishing every year the 3rd week of June when the fish are down 30-40 feet as the temp. has set-up ie. predictable and where the largest concentration of salmon are for this data. For me and maybe others compelling data and information as LCI participants fish all these time windows during a derby.

99% of my big salmon have been caught when I was either the only boat in the area or there was very little trafic. Time of day doesn't seem to make any difference in my boat, but crowds do. I try to get there first and move to other less crowed spots if I have to.
Pat and I have hit all the time on the clock with big fish but we both agree that the less boats around us the better chance we have to get " Mr Big". Twice during the Rotary at 530 am on our first pass we landed salmon to place with..... No other boats in sight. But on the other hand we also landed Two rotary and LCI fish mid morning and late afternoon. But again we were not in the pack.
We think the noise and disturbance spook those smart older big fish.
Here's a small stupid fact..... I don't fish under the Champlain bridge ( red can to red can)during the derbies. Why? We have landed thousands of salmon in that run but never..... not once one over 6 lbs and then only a handful of those. That's why I refer to smaller salmon as "Bridge Fish". There are so many salmon in that area that it can make your head spin.... just not derby winning trophy. At least for me. I did hear one time of a nice 7lber. We always said it was the noise from the bridge and all the boat traffic that kept the big boys away.
T

Todd:

When I fished for Browns and Kings on Ontario, the same was true as far as crowd noise, boat traffic, fishing pressure, etc . The biggest fish we caught and most of our friends caught were in "unused" water or at the very least on the extreme outside or inside of the "fleet". I can remember many times as the morning progressed, and the "fleet" would begin to move off-shore, some of our biggest fish would come from "just one more pass on the inside" after everyone else was gone.

Bigger fish also just seem more often to be loners??