The vessel is a brand new 21-foot Alumacraft Competitor equipped with state-of-the-art fishing gear, safety features and an impressive 150 horsepower Mercury tiller. She’s a spacious vessel, with enough room for three anglers to fish in comfort. We have all the necessary safety and navigation gear to make sure it’s convenient for long trips.
Bottom bouncing fresh eggs and egg imitations or live bait on light tackle is an extremely effective technique providing plenty of hits and hookups.
November – April
The Niagara is known as one of the best steelhead rivers in the world! These chrome leapers are one of the most exciting fish to catch on light tackle. Trophy Lake Trout and Brown Trout are also plentiful.
One of the most publicized fishing locations in the northeast in the last several years is the sand bar at the mouth of the Lower Niagara River where it drains into Lake Ontario.
From March thru May, this area is one of the most AMAZING fisheries you have ever seen!!
Lake Trout, Huge Brown Trout, and spring Coho and King Salmon gather to feed on smelt and alewives that gather at on the sandbar before they make their spring spawning runs up the lower river.
Catches of 30 fish or more a day are common.
The Lower Niagara River is home to some of the most numerous and extended trout and salmon migrations anywhere in the world. The Niagara Fish Assassins fish the Lower River predominantly from November to April in pursuit of giant steelhead, brown trout, and lake trout. The vessel is a 21-foot Alumacraft Competitor equipped with state-of-the-art fishing gear, safety features and an impressive 150 horsepower Mercury tiller that will keep you on fish, drag free, drifting all day!
Techniques in the river can vary from yarn-fly and ‘Lil Corkie egg imitators to fresh eggs to minnow imitations drifted close to bottom on light lines with long, limber, steelhead drift rods. There are days when pulling plugs and back-bouncing flatfish or kwikfish can turn some big steelhead and trout as well. Trophies abound in this amazing river.
From the rush of the fast-water drift at the Queenston docks below the ever-watching War of 1812 Brock Monument, to the quiet solitude of sliding down hundreds of yards on prime drifts toward the lake, the Lower Niagara is your key to trophy steelhead and trout.
Perhaps the most surprising element of the Niagara River fishery, aside from the huge numbers of trophy fish, is the amazing diversity of habitat available to fish and the fishermen that pursue them year-round. As a young angler, I had the great fortune to fish with some wise and experienced fishermen. In our travels together we stumbled upon a feature of the Lower Niagara River that I has no comparison anywhere I have fished. The river itself comes to an end at Niagara-on-the-Lake not far from Fort George and directly off shore of Fort Niagara (USA). As the river comes to a delta… as most rivers do, something inexplicable happens as the current surges and boils, the bottom drops on the sonar to over 120 feet, perhaps deeper as accurate soundings with that much turbulence can be tough to find. Over a span of approximately 400 yards that bottom returns to 23 feet where it stays in the rest of the outflow hundreds of more yards offshore. The fish that are congregated over that span of water (approx. 1000 yards out from the mouth by 2000 yards wide) is indescribable… from December to March this area of river and lake is home to thousands of lake trout, brown trout, chinook, and coho salmon. Anglers jigging 1–3-ounce jigs with soft plastic shad/smelt imitations or jigging spoons like crippled herring can find trout to 30 pounds and salmon to 20 pounds. These are juvenile salmon typically 2-4 years old and not thinking yet of spawning… just eating. The trout are mature browns and lakers just living large on smelt and alewife and spot-tail shiners washed up the slope of the delta from deep water. This is without a doubt a fishery that is unique to Niagara and accessible during times of the year that are typically not thought of as salmon and trout times of the year. Just another plus to this great area we know as Niagara.
