NORTHWESTERN ONTARIO CRAPPIES

Dogtooth Lake, located by Rushing River just east of Kenora in Northwestern Ontario, is a popular destination for a lot of anglers from all over North America, mostly because of the friendly welcome provided by Wayne and Patty Jones who have owned and operated this popular resort for a number of years.

Dogtooth has been producing trophy walleye on a consistent basis for a long time thanks to some stringent management regulations on the lake. It's also a boaters nightmare with narrow channels and submerged reefs all over the place which means going out the first couple of times with somebody who has been there or going slow and keeping a sharp eye on your depthfinder. It sure was worth the drive last September as we got into some tremendous crappie fishing with decent walleye fishing thrown in for good measure. We found the crappies suspended in the back of one of the bays on the lake in about nine metres of water. You could mark clouds of fish on your deptfinder but the first morning the bite was pretty tough. I finally started catching some fish by putting on a small 1/16 ounce tullibee hook and tipping it with a piece of nightcrawler and to get it down faster I graduated three split shots along my snell of six pound test Berkley Vanish fishing line. This snell was a metre in length and tied to a swivel on my main line which consisted of six pound test Berkley Fireline in the flame green colour. I prefer to use the Fireline while deep water jigging for improved sensitivity and add on the flurocarbon Berkley Vanish because it is virtually invisible underwater. While this doesn't matter when the fish are hungry it sure made a huge difference that day when the bite was a lot tougher. On the second day there, the crappies were a lot more aggressive and had no problem hitting a leadhead jig and Berkley Power Jigworm. Many of the lakes in Northwestern have some great crappie fishing including Lake of the Woods.

Back