With the exception of the previous two years, a number of us have taken an annual weekend getaway salmon fishing trip to the Oswego, NY area. The Oswego River is internationally known as one of the top salmon fishing spots and the reputation is well deserved. King, Coho and Atlantic salmon are plentiful and big and pack a wallop when hooked on the end of a fishing line. It is this particular fact that continues to bring us back to this town every late October or early November.
This year's trip included five of us. Four of us, myself and my Brother Dave and his son Travis and our cousin's husband Kenny Smith are veterans of this annual pilgrimage. One rookie this year though was Larry Cavallo. I have always bugged Larry and a number of my other buddies to give this fishing a shot and see if they liked it. They always came up with some lame excuse not to make the five hour trip north. However, the annual dirt track race at the New York State Fairgrounds that is held during Super DIRT Week in early October was rained out this year for the first time in around thirty years and it necessitated a rain date and it happened to be rescheduled for the weekend of our fishing trip. THAT was enough for Larry to give it a shot.
An inordinate amount of rain leading up to the trip had us watching the internet for constant updates on the river levels. Right up until when we left, we weren't even sure about whether we would be able to get into the river. As it turned out, the levels fell down to "fishable" levels the day before we left and as luck would have it, we happened to hit a great weekend of weather and fishing conditions. PHEW!!!
The picture below is a shot of a large area of the river which is located just in front of the Niagra-Mohawk electric generating station. This shot shows a rather tame shot of the area. As I said, the river had been high for weeks prior to our arrival and thus, the river was lacking in fisherman actually in this part of the river. The right half - near to the generation station is a very deep section and is usually loaded with salmon. The far side is fished mainly for trout.
Well, we hit the river early after a Friday morning 4:15AM wake up call. There is nothing like latching onto a hefty salmon in the early am hours with the sun just coming up to make you appreciate what Mother Nature supplies you. That's me below with one of my first "hook-ups" of the day.
My nephew Travis has been a regular on these trips and enjoys the sport. Below, he takes a moment from his fishing to turn around a look into the camera.
Below is Larry and he is enjoying one of many battles he had that day with numerous salmon. He was quickly convinced that he should come back in the years to come to fish the Oswego River again.
We all hooked up and had the chance to yell "FISH ON!" many, many times during the day on Friday. Here is Dave during one of the many times he snared another Chinook.
Kenny did much of his fishing as the guy the furthest up river of us and right around this massive boulder. Here below, he is doing his best imitation of the Captain Morgan commercial pose.
It didn't take long before we started to load up the stringers with the salmon. Here are a few pics of the bounty.
The gentleman pictured below was not one of our fishing party. He and another fisherman were fishing just below us and were doing just as well. In fact, he did fairly better than us. He happened to reel in not one, but two steelhead trout on the day. Pictured here is one of them.
After a number of hours in the morning, we had full stringers of three salmon each and headed up to the cleaning station to have the fish cut up into either fillets or steaks and bring them back to our hotel room cooler and take a quick rest and some lunch before heading back for an afternoon fishing session.
Travis probably landed the biggest salmon of the day and below, he is posing with the monster. No, that is not trick photography - the mouth of the salmon could have almost engulfed Trav's noggin.
The obligatory pictures of us holding up some nice catches follow.
Finally, some of our catch lies on the concrete floor of the cleaning station area. Within minutes, they will be transformed into fillets and steaks and packed into plastic bags for storage.
We had such a darned good Friday of salmon fishing, we made a last minute decision on Friday night to sleep in the next morning and arise maybe around eight AM and head down to the river and just check on the hole that we had been fishing and then if we didn't want to fish for salmon due to overcrowding, we would switch gears and do some trout fishing. As it turned out, it was a good decision as we managed to get a few to the net. None of them were the size that can come out of the Oswego River (and we saw a number of leviathans come out that day!) but to us they were large.
Larry, myself and Dave all managed to hook up with rainbow trout. All within five to six pounds. Larry also managed to bring in two nice little brown trout.
As always, it was another great time on the river - having a great time and catching some monster fish. The fishing in Oswego is an entirely different world of fishing than we are used to here in NJ. We look forward to each year's trip with much anticipation. Can't wait until next year. FISH ON!!
