Saguenay - Round 6

It's certainly been a weird year, but that didn't stop Alex and I from making our annual trip to the Saguenay Fjord for a round of ice fishing. The covid restrictions put a damper on our fishing time, so we focused on catching some fish we knew we could target reliably.

We started the first day at Anse à Benjamin where I figured we could get our limits of Deepwater Redfish pretty quickly. The fish were small, but the action was fairly consistent so it was a good time. We fished "à palier", a technique that presents lures at large intervals along your mainline, allowing you to cover most of the water column. After a few hours of jigging, we each filled up our daily limit of 5 Redfish!

Deepwater Redfish

Unfortunately, we didn't end up finding much diversity. In fact, every single fish we caught was a Deepwater Redfish. Normally we would spend the night out on the ice to maximize our fishing time, but covid curfew meant we had to stay at a hotel after 8PM. We made the best of the situation and rented a tiny log cabin.

The cabin was an awesome place to stay, but I was itching to get back on the ice come morning. We'd have to be leaving early in order to make it back home for curfew, so I decided the best course of action would be to do a quick session of smelt fishing. That way, I hoped we could actually get a decent amount of fish on the ice in the few hours we had.

Smelt fishing in saltwater is largely dependent on the tide, and the action was slow starting out. But, we kept at it, and slowly started piling up some fish. It was never hot action by any means, but we managed about 40-50 fish to make some tasty fish tacos :)

Rainbow Smelt