Why the small Browns?

[mrpike]

Hi Guys, I have had fair sucess for browns in Oswego just cant find any big fish, any reasons why the fish have been smaller in the past years? Also my bite is over by 8am, where do the fish go?

[Gray Fox]

I think that reason for the small browns is that we are just seeing a young age class. As long as guys dont keep every little fish they boat, we should have some good brown fishing in the next couple of years. We fished between fair haven and oswego this weekend and managed to get into some nice fish. We never made the water until 9:00 on saturday and had a blast. We fished deeper than most until other boats decided to quit. If we avoided the boat traffic we caught fish. Our bigger fish came in deeper water, further away from the creeks. Good Luck.

[GAMBLER]

The browns are shuttig off early because they are feeding on gobies and filling themselves up fast.

[mrpike]

How deep are you fishing? I target 8-10 fow early then slide out to 50 fow by 9am. I do think there is alot of truth to the goby connection, I try to skim the bottom with brown and black colors trying to imitate a goby. I have yet to catch a fish on traditional blue/silver (or any bright colors), all on crawfish and dark colors...maybe a goby thing again.

[Jolly II]

Part of the reason why many of the browns have been so small in recent years is that those fish are stocked fish that came from the Altmar Hachery. Those fish, whether steelhead or browntrout, tend to be smaller when stocked in the spring, usually 10-12 fish per pound. When the browns come from other hatheries, example Caledonia, those fish are much bigger when stock, 2-3 fish per pound. Altmar has a lot of cold water that feeds the hachery in the spring, during critical growth periods for the browns. If the water was warmer, around 50-55 degrees, those same fish would be much bigger when stocked, and therefore have a good jump start in the lake.

They may be small, but still fun to catch. Put them back and next year those fish will be our 5-10 pounders.

[Gray Fox]

Mrpike on saturday we fished 12-18 ft until around 11:30-12ish. Once the boats cleared out we moved in on the creeks and fished 6-10 fow. We had a bite that never shut off we quit at 2:30 after boating a triple all of which were bleeding bad and that filled our 9 fish limit (we kept what was bleeding bad all else were released).

[steelhead'r]

The small ones taste better

[traveling man]

my take on the small browns is the salmon fishing sucked last year. a lot of people targeted and kept a lot of browns.