When I began thinking about fishing New York a lot of possibilities came to mind.  There are countless bass and trout locations in New York to choose from in the hundreds of trophy lakes and rivers across the State.  But it was the lure of catching a Chinook (King Salmon) that intrigued me the most – and Lake Ontario was where I hoped Taylor might catch his first King.

There are hundreds of charter boats that work these waters but it was Jeremy Sage of J.D.’s Custom Charters that caught my attention.  Here was a young man with fire in his belly – a guy would loved to fish, was apparently good at it, inspired by our journey – and most importantly someone with the personality I wanted to spend a morning on the water with.

Like any young entrepreneur Jeremy was hoping he could get some good press from our relationship on the water today so a good showing would really be great.

The day began early today – 4am is when my alarm went off.  Crawling out of bed is getting tougher each day but I knew some eager people were waiting.  I find that the best way to wake Taylor up is to move the RVs slide out back in while he’s on it – seems to motivate him.  We got a bit turned around in our drive to meet everyone but luckily a Rochester newspaper reporter, Leo Roth (who would be coming along with us on the water) saw us pass by and ran us down.  Between the two of us we found our rendezvous point with Captain Jeremy and his first mate Dan Hess.  A local television station out of Rochester was also present and setup for a 5:40am interview.  We’re not exactly sure what we said but hopefully they can edit something useful from our sleepy babble.

Captain Jeremy had been working hard on the Salmon patterns leading up to our outing and had determined that we needed to trailer our boat about 40 miles to the Southwest and launch out of Olcott, NY in order to have our best chances.  His predictions were spot on.  In the end, Taylor and I would both rank today’s fishing experience in the Top 3 of the 39 States we’ve fished to date – an awesome showing for Captain Jeremy.

By mornings end Taylor would land a 20 lb King Salmon, beating my 14 lb King soundly and top it off with a Lake Ontario citation trophy Steelhead of 10 lbs.  All I can say is “UNCLE”!

We boated 9 fish in just over 3 hours of trolling with Kings of 20, 14, 10, 8, 3, and 2 lbs; and Steelheads of 10, 7, and 5 lbs.  We also had about 10 other short hits and fights that didn’t net a fish.  There weren’t many moments of relaxation, but when we were Jeremy was feverishly working the downriggers, lure patterns, motor speed to maximize our chances – it was simply impressive.  If you find your way in the Lake Ontario region of New York please do me a favor and give this guy a call – you won’t regret it.

Although the water was as rough as Lake Erie the day before we both experienced no signs of sea sickness and thoroughly enjoyed our outing under blue skies.  We even had a faint distant view of Toronto’s skyline on the horizon to the northwest.

Today was a day of wonderful memories – and a place we will definitely return to – for the fish and for the company of the friends we made.