Lake Whitefish Spawn

 I've spent a good amount of time reading up on the fishing regulations for my home province of Quebec, and I've always been drawn to a couple of "exceptions" written into the rules for a few select fisheries. In the past, I've taken advantage of the spring dipnetting season for Rainbow Smelt, but I've always wanted to see a Whitefish run. Now when I say Whitefish, I mean the salmonid, not Fallfish or any other random silver fish folks call "whitefish".

Well, this fall, I was finally prepared to make it happen. I kept tab on water temperatures and made my way to the nearest legal netting river when the time was right, which just so happened to be Halloween night. The nearest run happens on the St-Francois river in the town of Disraeli, only about an hour and a half away. It was rainy and the water was a bit dirty, but I hoped I'd still have a shot at a couple fish.

We waited for night to fall, and before long, I was donning my headlamp and waders and headed into the current. The dirty water made it hard to see much of anything, so I focused on the shallows for a while and ended up accidentally catching this Mottled Sculpin which was kinda cool.

Mottled Sculpin

Unfortunately, the Whitefish clearly weren't hanging out in the shallows. So, I made my way into deeper water and found a slack area just upstream of a riffle where I could just see to the bottom in about 2' of water. After a good while of searching, I finally saw the shape of a larger fish lazily making its way up river. I scooped it into the net and had my first ever netted Lake Whitefish!

Lake Whitefish

I only ended up catching one more, but I had accomplished what I had come for and felt like I had a pretty good idea of what this unique fishery was about. It wasn't a spectacular run with the river absolutely filled with fish like I expected, but still very cool!