Lake Trout Fishing on Lake Ontario

The fish everyone trolls over

Walk the docks at Oswego in August and every conversation is about kings. That is reasonable — Lake Ontario grows the heaviest chinook in the system — but it means a large, catchable lake trout population sits under the fleet largely unbothered. On a day when the salmon bite dies at nine in the morning, the lakers do not care.

Lake Ontario is 802 feet at its deepest and averages 283, so cold water is everywhere and the fish have room. Eight to fourteen pounds is the common range, with fish over twenty coming off the eastern shoals most years.

Two very different ends of one lake

The western end — the Niagara Bar, Wilson, Olcott, Thirty Mile Point — is a steep drop fishery. The bottom falls from 20 feet to over 400 in a short distance, and you fish the contour. It produces well in spring when the fish are shallow on the bar, and again in summer at 150 to 220 feet.

The eastern basin is a different animal: shoals, islands and hard bottom around Galloo Island, Stony Point and the Ducks, in depths a mid-size boat can work comfortably. It is the friendliest lake trout water on the lake, it fishes well from May through October, and it is where vertical jigging really shines.

Getting the last five feet right

Everything in summer lake trout fishing comes down to bottom contact. In 170 feet of water, a bait at 155 catches occasional fish and a bait at 165 catches consistently. Follow the contour on the sonar and adjust the rigger constantly. The other half of it is speed: 1.7 to 2.0 mph, not the 2.4 you were running for kings an hour earlier.

If you are running a mixed spread — which most Ontario boats do — dedicate the low rigger and one wire diver to lakers and leave the rest high for salmon. The divers will catch both.

Diet and color

Ontario lake trout eat alewife, round goby and sculpin. The alewife component is larger here than on Huron or Superior because Ontario still has a substantial alewife population, which is also why the kings grow so heavy. Practical effect: silver and white spin-glos and dodgers earn their keep alongside the brown and olive goby imitations that dominate elsewhere.

There is a fishery-science wrinkle worth knowing. Lake trout that eat mostly alewife suffer thiamine deficiency that kills their fry, which is a major reason natural reproduction here lags behind Huron and Superior. The lake that grows the best salmon is, for the same reason, harder on its native char.

Spring on the bar

April and May on the Niagara Bar is one of the great underappreciated fisheries on the chain. The water is 40 to 48 degrees top to bottom, brown trout, lake trout and early kings are all in 20 to 70 feet, and you can catch them on planer boards with light tackle within sight of the river mouth. It is small-boat fishing, it happens before the crowds, and it takes big fish.

Weather notes

Ontario’s east-west orientation gives a westerly a long fetch, and the shallower eastern shelf stands the resulting waves up steep and close together. A pleasant morning run from Oswego to Mexico Bay can be a punishing return. The eastern islands offer shelter that the south shore does not. Carry a VHF, watch the wind forecast rather than the current conditions, and remember that the water you are fishing 150 feet down is in the 40s in every month of the year.