tent – The Outdoors Guy

(Sr. Outdoors Guy with a nice cold water brook trout we caught, with surface temp ranging from 49 – 54 degrees F)

My annual trout fishing trip to Temiscaming with my Dad and brother-in-law’s is a time I look forward to all year long..regardless if we catch a lot fish, mystery or otherwise.

This year certainly was a great trip fishing-wise, and a very poor one weather-wise, with bitter cold daytime temps and even 3″ of snow on the tent one morning!

Oh well, when you’re catching fishing like this, who cares!!

(Photo of ‘mystery trout’ now beleived to be an Aurora trout)

(Here’s Bruce with a great looking male brookie pulled from ‘Lac Perdu’)

This year we released 12 trout(10 brook, 2 mystery) – the most trout we ever have released; including one fish well over 3 pounds!

(Not a bad looking camping spot!)

(Not a bad tent set-up too!)

(The boys working on breakfast inside the tent)

Mystery solved!!!

Ok, thanks to Maple(& others) for their assitance in finally identifying our mystery trout!

What I had always considered to be ‘Quebec Reds’ appear to be the endangered species called Aurora trout. Although we only caught two this year (both released) we have probably caught more than 20 of these special fish over the years.

In our secret lake we call Lac Perdu, brook trout and Aurora trout appear to live together(& spawn) in harmony. The brookies account for probably 90% of the lakes population with Aurora accounting for maybe 10%.

Now that we know what they are, and after reading up on this rare fish, we will no longer keep any of them from this lake. According to what I read, the Aurora experts are not coming out and labelling the Quebec Aurora’s with that name, as they claim all Auroras’ are found within Ontario waters.

The QC Aurora’s currently found in only 2-3 lakes(I gues 4 now), at the moment, appear to be a mystery. The original Aurora’s were distributed only in lakes around Sudbury, and most of those fell victim to acid rain.

Just one more reason I enjoy my annual trout fishing trips. You never know what you’re going to catch!

Here are some close-up shots of the QC Aurora we caught two years ago. The ones from this year were released safely at boatside and no photos were taken:

You can see how they differ from regular brook trout with a lack of ‘halo’ spots and lack of vermiculation on the fins and upper half of their body.

Outdoorsguy

My annual trout fishing trip to Temiscaming is a time I look forward to all year long..regardless weather we catch a lot fish or not.

The date is May 14th and since we were arriving smack dab in middle of a New Moon and beginning of a cold front, I know we’d at least be in for a couple of days of good fishing.

Which is exactly what happened…2.5 days of great action and then the sun and warm weather arrived and the fish went into hiding. At which point, the black flies came out in droves (Iggy was right)..but hey, I’m not complaining.

As we hit the first lake on opening day and I set up my Humminbird sonar..I was pleasantly tickled to see surface water temp was a scant 52 degrees F – quite surprising given the early spring we had. Chances were the lakes had not ‘turned-over’ completely and 52 degrees was the water temp from top to bottom!

Things did heat up a tad while we were there, but water temp stayed just below 60!

Here’s a pic of my father and Bruce on opening day, showing evidence of how cold it really was them..daytime high barely went 5 degrees C. (This meant toques were required at night for sleeping!

After boating 14 nice trout in the 13-17″ range from our first lake, we get our canoe in position for fishing ‘Lac Perdue’ on the second day..the smaller than average size turned out to be the norm for the week.

The place we’ve been camping for the past 10 years has become like a familiar friend, on the shores of a scenic but non-trout lake. The resident loons were nice to see though.

Here is my brother-in-law Steve cleaning fish by the lake shore with his special bug suit on. Everybody had one of these things but me..mine was still at home in the garage…dooh!

This photo was taken from my Bushnell Trophy Cam I had set-up over-looking our camp area. It was to monitor all unwanted visitors, but managed mostly to capture images of guys going for a late night pee.

Here is a decent-sized brookie I caught slow-trolling a Williams W55 Lite…

This dark trout was taken by Steve on our secret lake with the mysterious brook trout/QC Red trout..either way, they’re not your average strain of trout…they are very dark and many of the fish from this lake don’t even have spots. At the office, they mistook these trout for lakers.

I’ll leave you with this shot of my father in front of our tent setup, a place I consider as home away from home. In the end we had a great fish meal, lots of laughs, a few games of horse-shoes and a handfull of fish shy of our limit…no 5 pounders this year, but all in all, a pretty damn good trip!

I forgot to mention that on this trip I also presented my father with the first copy of my new book ‘Weird Facts about Fishing’ – the book was dedicated to him afterall…

Tag: tent

Outdoors Guy Annual trout trip solves mystery

Outdoorsguy spring trout trip