Fished the Bar with Ken my long time guest here is my 6 day summary from Facebook:
A great 6 days at the Bar totaling 47 hours of rods in the water trolling. 4 wires and 2 Riggers for two of us. Sunday was the best day with an insane bite! We landed 70 Kings / 3 LT / 2 Steel / 3 Coho over the 6 days. 1 nice king on the LOC board for awhile before it gets booted in the next few days. All were released to swim another day and the one we registered 20 lbs 12 oz 40" we gave to a couple of fisherman visiting near the Youngstown weigh station on the river. Smart Troll system was amazing tracking my Slide Diver wires in the water. It was 80% wire bites this week! Great time!
I fish with wire only. Flea reason first. Second I no longer run any braid. If your running 4 divers and the wire crosses a braid it will cut it like a knife!
30 lb Mason Camo brown wire 1,000 ft per reel.
8-8.5 hours one way including lunch and restroom stops (lol). Old guy. 430 miles one way most of it Toll road I-90.
Sounds like an epic trip Ron and your tech edge paid off in spades! I am headed over in July (Oswego) to continue my quest to learn the King fishery, young Sully tagging along with his boat. As I said in previous posts I’ve only brought my boat over once before and we caught some in spite of ourselves, hopefully having another boat will cut down on the hunt for the bait. As you know the pull of a decent King rivals that of comparable size saltwater fish and I’m addicted! I told my wife if it was under 150 miles I would be over every other weekend
Look forward to more Ontario reports in the interim
Pat
It's interesting you mention company Pat. It's very helpful to have other boats with you in pursuit of Kings. Some days out 300 fow and out to 500 fow depending on the winds the day before. Other days 100 fow. We have 6-8 boats every year from 3-4 different states in our group to help drill it down each day.
The other thing I think has really helped in the last few seasons is taking off the 3rd and 4 th downrigger off the boat and utilitizing 4 wires and commit to that. 3 rods a person and two people this is a great strategy with 6 rods in the water. Most of the time here it's one slide diver and one rigger per side with 2 licenses.
Ontario is definitely a different world for a Champlain guy. My first day I found good bait and marks after moving around for 4 hours in 200 FOW down 75. After a second pass and no I takers started watching my gear closer and cables were headed UNDER the boat at times with 10# weights at 2.65 SOG I bumped it up to 4.85 and within 5 min had my first King. Apparently there had been borderline gale winds for 2 days before we got there the blowback/undertow was ripping!
I ordered 2 Penn reels earlier this week to spool up with wire just for Ontario and will be trying a few new things I have learned from you and others. If I get desperate a Fish Hawk is next
