Ontario Pre-Spawn Bass Fishing!

Ontario Pre-Spawn Bass Fishing!

Want your shot at your personal best smallmouth bass? A fish that registers well over 5lbs and + 20”? Pre-spawn is your opportunity.

While Southern and Central Ontario have closed seasons for bass during spring, many parts of Ontario host a 365 day bass fishery or pre-spawn opportunities, including the Algoma region and Lake Ontario. This past week Rob from Drift and Aldo from the So Fly Podcast were up in Elk Lake on the Montreal River on the hunt for pre-spawn bass, conditions were challenging, but they got into them.

We don’t hear much about pre-spawn bass in Southern Ontario, for the most part because of our closed spring seasons for bass rule out pre-spawn opportunities. But, to your dedicated and passionate bass angler, pre-spawn is a very worthwhile period worth travelling for. Fish during this period get aggressive, the water is warming up after a long winter, their metabolisms are in high gear, and the big fish show-up in the shallows who may otherwise live their lives in the deep through the summer.

As an example you may be familiar with, if you fish for Great Lakes steelhead in the spring in Southern Ontario, inevitably you will hook into some of the largest smallmouth of your life, but out of season. Many of these tank sized smallmouth bass migrate up from the lakes and find their spawning habitat in the rivers, this is the type of fishing we're talking about!

Do we have your attention yet?

Recently Zone 20 (Lake Ontario) was awarded a pre-spawn fishery, many anglers have been taking advantage of the opportunity and landing many fish well over 6 lbs in a single day, some in the 7 lbs+ range, where 20” 5lbs bass are average and very common.

Many of these larger fish often inhabit waters out of typical fly rod range during the regular season, but pre-spawn, they’re up shallow in less than 15’ of water. You also don’t have to travel far to experience this fishery, Toronto’s Lake Ontario shoreline is on the pre-spawn location hit-list!

On a trip to Algoma with Guide Tyler Dun Rob has previously experienced incredible pre-spawn smallmouth fishing in Trophy Ally which keeps drawing him back to this experience. It is one of those experiences where he admitted he wishes he had been taking advantage of for years. The pre-spawn fishery is an eye opener to the incredible bass fishing we have right here in Ontario.

Back to our most recent trip…

The Montreal River was put on our radar when our good friends from the So Fly Podcast spent time there in years past having a great time catching stunning smallmouth, many fish in the “trophy” category. While looking at the Ontario regulation summary, we realized that the Montreal River upstream of Elk Lake had a full year bass fishery, we had to check it out for pre-spawn knowing it produced incredible opportunities during the regular season.

We booked our accommodation, drove the 5 hours and 42 minutes from Downtown Toronto, settled in, and developed our plan for the next day… with one hiccup we had to adjust for… the river was anywhere from 6’ to 10’ high depending on location. What should have been land was well underwater, and areas that typically held bass for Aldo on previous trips were unrecognizable.

With extremely high water, what do you do?

Think like a fish, or at least try.

Think about where you would you want to be as a fish, not where you’d like to catch them as an angler.

Our plan was to run & gun, finding where the fish were holding, not spending too much time in one spot if it wasn’t producing fish or at least having follows. If we had success, fish it some more, then go find water just like it elsewhere.

Day one was less productive in terms of hooking and landing fish than we would have wanted, but valuable intel was collected. We had fish follows, a number of huge bass chased after our pike sized flies, and we missed a number of great fish. As we predicted, fish were in current breaks, and over river bottoms, such as sand, that collected heat from the sun’s rays. We burned a lot of fuel running the river and fished hard, exploring the Montreal from Elk Lake up to Indian Chutes Falls. We would carry the lessons we learned over to day two, day one was a scouting day.

Day two was more of the same, but we focused time on where we had our successes (fish showing themselves) the day before. There was a change this day as well, the water level overnight dropped 12”, which seemed to have had positive impact on the fish.

Fish were now hooked and landed, the plan paid off. Slightly softer flows (relatively speaking) gave the fish conditions they needed to feed and strike with more confidence. We even had a boat-side eat where a fish peeled out of an eddy and smashed a fly all within view! A number of very healthy and chunky smallmouth were in our net, quick photos were taken, and released. The majority of the fish we caught were well sub surface and out of sight, 6’ to 3’ deep, most fish didn't want to move too far up for a fly.

Day Three, we changed gears. Rain settled in, and a lot of it. Instead of heading back up river we descended in the Montreal River to Mountain Lake in search of pike. We were early for pike, as spring was late. We did not find fish in their usual places, and the ravenous spring pike we were hoping to find were still in spawning mode and not interested in chasing flies. How late was spring? It was the days after the May 2-4 weekend, the leaves on trees were just thinking of budding, and the biting bugs we had heavily prepared for were not out yet… we were very early. There is a correlation between blackflies and fish, if the bugs are out, fishing tends to be on, with the inverse also being true.

To cap off day three, after a warm-up in our river-side cabin, we went back up river of Elk Lake and caught a few last smallmouth before going back in to dry out, pack-up and head out the next morning.

All in all, an incredibly successful trip finding fish in challenging conditions, and for Aldo an opportunity to see a river he knew well but in an entirely new light in a new season! We look forward to heading back to Elk Lake and the Montreal River later in the season for more killer smallmouth opportunities.

The river is incredibly beautiful, densely tree lined banks, classic Northern Ontario tannic water, with warm sand banks on a number of corners to take much needed breaks on.

We did have a powered boat for this trip which made logistics easy, we entered the river at Elk Lake’s public boat launch and navigated up and down river from there. The distance from Elk Lake to Indian Chute Falls involves 21km of river navigation. If you’re considering this trip, keep this in mind for your choice of craft.

A note of caution, when presented with the very high water levels we had, great care was taken in navigating the flowing waters. If you find yourself in a situation with big flows, any flows for that matter, plan many steps ahead, know your routes of egress if things go wrong (a motor dies or loses power), keep aware of your surroundings, don’t become distracted, and always have a strategy and plan. Safety first, and wear your PFD’s!

Looking to raft it? We’re exploring this possibility for ourselves, which would require a steep, obstruction filled and lengthy put-in by Indian Chutes Falls, with a drag out of the raft where the river meets the road 12 km downstream. Please take extreme caution if you will consider this route and only do so if your experience is up to the task, this is something we're looking to do but haven't tried ourselves yet.

Now, for the gear…

What we used, what worked, and what didn’t?

This was a trip for the big sticks! We brought along a variety of rod weights, reels, and lines, but as typical, only a few were used. It was incredibly important on this trip to bring along the battleship of gear, we didn’t know what to expect. The gear we intended to use for pike ended up being our smallmouth arsenal. The 7wt and 8wt rods with a mix of floating, intermediate, sink-tip, and full-sink lines were ineffective at getting our flies to where the fish were. We could have hoped all day that a fish would have rose to our flies, but we would have been essentially fishless for the trip. 9wt and 10wt rods with their compliment of sinking lines was the ticket. The rod weights were not needed to fight the fish, but the difference in their line mass was the ticket to being successful, we needed lines that would pull our flies down into the river quickly into the strike zone.

Under typical spring pre-spawn conditions and normal flows 7wt and 8wt options would have been our go-to’s.

Yes, this is coming from a fly shop, but having an arsenal of gear ready to meet conditions is a key to finding success no matter where you go. When exploring new water and unknown conditions, be ready, don’t expect fish to come to your fly no matter where it is. Find those fish and get your fly into their strike-zone.

Key Gear:

Sunglasses for

Cloudy Days & Low Light Periods (morning and evening)

Smith Guide Choice – Low Light Ignitor

Sunglasses for Sunny Days

Costa Mirror Green Lens

Smith Bronze Mirror Lens

Set-Up #1:

Rod: Sage R8 Salt 9wt

Reel: Sage Spectrum 9/10

Line: Airflo Shovel Head

Rod Set-Up #2

Rod: Echo Prime 10wt

Reel: Sage Spectrum 9/10

Line: Scientific Angler Titan Taper 10 wt F/S3/S5

Leader & Tippet

We did not go below 12lb SA Fluorocarbon for our terminal end of our leader. We had larger flies we were casting in heavy current and needed the ability to keep a lot of pressure on fish to get them out of faster flows.

We constructed our own knotted tapered leaders with this recipe:

Material:

18” 16lbs SA Fluoro Saltwater Supreme

18” 12 lbs SA Fluoro Saltwater Supreme

S.A. Fluoro Saltwater Supreme has incredible knot strength, even if you get a wind knot in your leader it keeps significant strength = more confidence and less lost fish.

A plus to this leader set-up is the ability to quickly add 12” of wire leader if we come across a productive pike area, not needing to change our entire set-up.

Flies

This is time to have fun, pre-spawn fish hit BIG flies. Forget your smaller clousers, buggers, and finesse patterns, big fun flies produce! Think anything from 4”-6” flies, up to pike sized flies!

Boat Storage:

Scientific Angler Large Fly Boxes

Hydration:

Yeti Yonder

Yeti 1 Gallon Jug

Nippers:

Scientific Angler Nippers

Are you fishing for them while they spawn?

No! We are careful to observe behaviour and avoid fishing for any bass on spawning sites. These nesting sites are typically easy to see, similar to salmon or steelhead redds, as they are an area of the river or lake bottom is “dusted off” by the fish to expose better spawning habitat. This dusting off creates what looks to be a bullseye, in this case we are avoiding the bullseyes. Bass nests can be quite small, or quite large, they can be next to rocks and boulders, stumps, branches, or just in the wide open, you’ll need to keep a keen eye out to avoid them.

It is also good to keep in mind that not all fish spawn at the same time, while some fish are spawning, others are still in pre-spawn behaviour, while others have completed the task and are in post-spawn mode.

Well, why avoid spawning fish on nests? Bass are very vulnerable while they are spawning, they are often sitting on a bullseye making them very easy to find and cast to. While on their nests they are extremely protective, and are on 24/7 guard duty – if an intruder, including a fly or lure gets near or in the nest, they’ll attack. As the fish attempts to remove the threat and leaves the nest, nest invaders step in, often within just seconds. Threats from panfish, to gobies can clean out eggs quickly removing an entire generation of young. If an angler takes a fish off a nest, snaps a few photos, and releases the fish those are critical seconds where irreparable harm is done. We ask that if you do come across a bass that is protecting its nest, move along and find others that are not.

Check out this video to see an example of what we're talking about!

Want to learn more about these amazing opportunities? Get in touch and we'll be happy to help you plan your next trip!

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