Fall fun in Ontario's Sunset Country!
Thursday, October 30, 2014 at 9:54PM Man, I've had a tough time keeping up with my website over the past few months...just to much stuff on the go! Over the past couple of months I've been staying busy, doing lot's of fishing and a little bit of hunting. It's been fun. This time of year is always fun because there is so much stuff to do if you like to spend time in the outdoors.
Fall is always one of the best times to catch crappies and I have been getting in on some of that action. In addition to a few fun trips I was also able to film a good segment for my TV show Fishing with Gussy all about fall crappies - how to find them on the Humminbird, then catch them.
Before the lake trout season closed on September 30, Brian McNanney and I had a great day catching a few of these beauty fish on Lake of the Woods and got an awesome TV show done - look for season four shows to start airing in January. We were catching these fish vertically jigging under the boat with a Northland Impulse 5" Smelt Minnow on a 3/8 oz Slurp Jig. 
Fall is also prime time to catch big walleyes...they get a little deeper than they are during the summer but they are usually in the mood to bite. This one ate a Jackall Clone Fry rigged up on a Northland Slurp Jig.
After a busy summer I was busy filming TV shows this fall and got a great show done in late September catching pike with Jackall Squad Minnow 120 jerkbaits. They get out of the weeds and on the main lakes rocks once the water temperatures start to drop and it's a great time to be on the water chasing these toothy critters. 
I finally got on a good umbrella rig bite this fall and man was it fun. My buddy Jamie Bruce turned me on to it and this was my first "double" on the rig...a couple of nice smallmouths. These rigs don't work everywhere but if cisco are the main forage they seem to be pretty deadly. 
I fished a few tournaments in late September and early October and they went pretty good. In this shot, my nephew Dustin Hager and my buddy Karl Engstrom hold up part of our 18 pound, third place catch in the one-day Frank McClymont Memorial tournament at Shoal Lake.
In the Shoal Lake Last Chance tournament, Dennis Favreau and I took 2nd place, while my good buddies Scott Dingwall and Jay Samsal won. The next weekend at the Whitefish Bay tournament on Lake of the Woods, Mike Reid and I took 2nd again while Brian McNanney and Matt Rydberg took first. 
After a couple of rough winters our whitetail deer population here in NW Ontario has been hit pretty hard. There are still a decent number of deer around but we have lost a lot of our mature bucks, which get hit the hardest because they are so run down from the rut process in the fall. So I have decided to take a break from the deer hunting this year. Hopefully we'll start to get some better weather over the next couple of winters and these deer recover. We'll see what happens.
In the meantime I have been doing quite a bit of duck hunting and grouse hunting and it's been great. I have not really duck hunted since high school so it's been fun to get back into it. My shooting needs some practice though! And grouse numbers are surprisingly high after a cold spring which is usually bad for these birds. I have had some great days grouse hunting this fall and have been eating good! They are probably my favourite thing on the whole planet to eat!
It's on to big game hunting now, chasing some moose and deer. Hopefully I'll have some good pictures to post in the coming weeks!
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It's time for fishing. In just a few short weeks die-hard enthusiasts and casual anglers from all over the continent will be starting their journey, equipped with rod and reel, to set up at outposts and lodges all over the North-West in hopes of hooking the ultimate catch.