Brown Trout Fishing
For many trout fishermen, Brown trout are it. When we spend the year chasing 10 to 16 inch Browns, sooner or later, you're attention will go to chasing the biggest Brown trout that you can find. This usually means big bucks and world travel with a passport. What I have here is, world-class Brown trout, without the world travel.
After spending three years living and feeding in Lake Ontario, the Brown trout will grow to an average weight between eight to 10 pounds by the time they make the first spawning run. I have seen them as big as 20 pounds. These are very old Brown trout, about five to seven years old. Every year we catch Browns as big as 16 to 18 pounds, not many but a few. The Brown trout start to show up from the lake in late October. The real fishing starts in November.
Not all of the rivers along Lake Ontario have runs of Brown trout. The Western end of Lake Ontario is where most of the Brown trout rivers are located. I do most of my fishing on lesser-known creeks where there is less fishing pressure and excellent runs of Brown trout. These creeks have several miles for the Browns to spread out, giving us plenty of room to fish. Fall Brown trout fishing is sight fishing. We will find most of our active fish in the riffs and runs. All through November is spawning time for the Brown trout. Browns have no problem taking time off to do some eating. After 2 to 3 weeks of the salmon using the same locations for their own spawning, the gravel beds are now saturated with eggs. There are still a few Chinook salmon spawning. With the addition of the Brown trout spawning activity, there will always be a large surplus of eggs drifting down River. As with most trout fishing, matching the hatch is the name of the game, this is no different we will be matching the egg drift.
What is neat about Brown trout is that when they finish spawning, they do not leave the river quickly, as steelhead will sometimes do. Browns will stay and go on the feed. By late November the intensity of the spawning activity will be winding down and now we will be spending more time fishing the pools. The fly box has also started to expand as the Brown trout's diet is quickly expanding. Most of our rivers have a lot of resident minnows, and the Browns take full advantage of this and feed them these minnows aggressively. We will continue to fish for the Brown's until winter ice freezes us out.
A freezing river does not drive the Browns out of the river and back in to Lake. They just drop into the deeper pools and continue to feed. We will go back to fishing for the Browns once the ice clears out. Ice out usually happens around late February to early March. You will want to get on the rivers as soon as the conditions allow. At this point we are fishing for Browns on borrowed time. The dropping water flows and warming water temperatures will send the Browns back to the Lake to feed until November.
