Niagara Bar Trolling

[Baron21]

I'm brand new to the forum. I introduced myself in the other thread. Short version, I'm from Western Pennsylvania and fish Lake Erie, Niagara River, and Lake Ontario as much as I can (which isn't enough!) 

 

All this talk of the fishing heating up is making me want to make the trip up to Lady O. My family and I are free this upcoming weekend. We recently bought a new boat and completely outfitted her for trolling last year. This is our first time trolling the Niagara Bar region in the spring. I mainly just have some broad questions about trolling this area. Is next weekend still a little too early for trolling the bar? We would love to get into some kings but honestly, we'd be more than happy with catching anything.

 

We have all the standard gear: 2 riggers, 4 big dipsy rods, a couple inline planers, wire diver down the shoot and an assortment of spoons and flasher/flies. I recently picked up some 6" red spin doctors as I heard these can be killer for coho.

 

Thank you for any and all help. If we get out this weekend I will be sure to let everyone know how we did.

[tlox]

Not sure what the fishing is like at the bar right now, but I can tell you the water is still very muddy.  Clarity is pretty poor, and in the past, that hasn't made fishing (for me at least) very productive.  I'm anticipating the calmer weather that's coming will help settle things down a bit though, and the weekend forecast looks pretty good.  That said, I'll be giving it a shot on Sunday myself out there.

[Baron21]

So we went out trolling the bar for our first time this weekend on Sunday. We were all ready to drift around the green can with minnows for lakers but at the last second we decided to run out and give it a shot. We trolled around for 3 hours and managed 1 coho and had a hit on a high dipsy. Looked like there were 10-15 other boats out and we only saw one other fish on that was lost right at the boat. 

 

tlox how did you guys do?

 

We heard they were killing the lakers around the green can and also that around Olcott was doing well. We chose the worst option it appears but it was still a great day out on the water.

[tlox]

Nothing doing out deeper, we were working 55 - 120 FOW with no action for 3 hours.  Ran in behind the green can and took 4 lakers in an hour and a half and then called it a day.  A slow day fishing isn't nearly as fun when the east wind gets the lake whipped up.

[Baron21]

I hear ya about the east wind. The first couple hours were nice but it really picked up. Wunderground's "1 foot or less" wave forecast went out the window really quick. We went up into the river up to Artpark and the hole but nothing was going on. When we got back to the Fort Niagara launch around 4PM there were solid 2-3 footers in the river, we docked and got off the water just in time.