Canadian Wilderness – Sutton River Specs

I hadn’t done anything I would consider grand in a while so I signed onto a trip to the Sutton River in Northern Ontario for Hudson Bay run Brook Trout. Logistically it’s a 12+ hour drive from the cities to Hearst, On and then a 2.5 hour float plane flight to Hawley Lake. The river runs north roughly 75 miles via canoe to Hudson Bay. There’s a First Nation outpost on Hawley Lake run be Albert Chookomolin. The last half of this trip runs thru Polar Bear Provincial Park so eyes and ears are on alert on the lower river. A few days before we started our trip Albert shot a polar bear off the dock at his camp on Hawley Lake so there is potential for a polar bear encounter anywhere on the river. Our trip was polar bear free but we did see a sizeable black bear and a number of caribou.

Fishing was actually pretty easy. The name of the game was to fish out of the canoe until you saw a spot you really liked or ran into a pod of fish. Water clarity was clear so you could easily spot fish. If you got into fish you beached the canoe to thoroughly work the spot. As a general rule you were looking for the head end and tailouts of runs/pools and bank/channel cuts. I brought both spinning and fly gear. Spinning wise I was using #4 & #5 spinners. I’m sure plastics and surface plugs would have worked well also. The main requirement is single barbless hooks. The bread and butter fly by far was a Dahlberg Diver. I also fished mouse patterns but the Dahlberg fished fast and allowed you to cover a lot of water. The first hole I stepped into with the flyrod made the trip for me. I was skating a mouse pattern and had many blow ups and aggressive surface takes.

The weather was basically the months of Sept & Oct rolled into a 10 day period. 80 degs with T-Storms to blustery 38 deg with wind driven rain. We tended to have a lot more wind on the lower half of the river. It definitely challenged by fly casting skill although I got plenty of practice with the double haul. I really could have benefited from stepping up the fly line weight.

Water was low and the fishing was actully below average for Sutton standards. Not sure if it was a combination of warm temps & low water or a smaller run. What that translated to me was an average of 35 fish a day which I’ll take in a heartbeat. Especially when you have a shot at 22″-24″ brook trout. Most of the fish caught were 16″-20″. The biggest I caught was 23″ on the nose and I believe the biggest for the group was a 23.25 incher. I was left with the idea of when can I go back. I’ll try to post more pics.

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More Sutton Pics…

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And more….

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You get the picture…

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Nice report. Beautiful fish!!!

That did not suck.

Thank you for sharing!

One interesting item was there was a group one day behind us on the river. They were all from India. Apparently they fished in India but wilderness canoe camping wasn’t in their library of experiences. They had been asking about designated camp sites and the pilot was saying he had to show them how to hold a canoe paddle. Lucky for them the river was pretty forgiving with only a few class I rapids. To give them credit they passed us on day 8. They were low on the river so hopefully they finished their trip without incident.

Awesome report…Those are truly amazing Brook Trout or Specs as Canadians call them. There are not too many places in the world you can catch an average of 35 Brook Trout/Day between 16″ and 22″ and it is considered below par. The Sutton River is definitely on my short list of must do trips in my lifetime.

Wish I would have been able to do the trip with you this year. Hopefully, we can do 4 man trip in a couple years from now. At least you were able to scout everything out for us. I am also glad you didn’t run into any Polar Bears.

Thanks for pics they were amazing to look at.

tegg wrote:

You get the picture…

I sure do. I wish I was in the picture. That’s certainly on my bucket list. Do they have Arctic char there too?

No Char that I’m aware of. Basically Brook Trout and Pike. We caught a number of pike up to 34″.

Speaking of Char I’ve been eyeing Char fishing in Greenland. They’re not trophies but sounds like good numbers of fish 2-10 pounds.

Wow! What a trip.

Taken in context, there are probably less than a dozen other places in the world where you could go to reliably catch >35 brook trout of that size class in one day.

That’s an incredible trip and an adventure.

Grouse

We fished the Albany River. Although we didn’t intentionally target spec’s we got some up to 22″ (only a handful), it was very surprising that good sized specs would be in the same spots as lunker pike > 40″ and walleye > 28″, in the current that is where the food was. The Albany is a wild and very dangerous river to fish and requires a guide.
The call of the north is strong. We flew in ~ 120 miles. I understand the Sutton is a much further flight and I saw trophy’s of male brook trout (the ones with the color) that had to be > 5 pounds that came from the Sutton River. It would be nice to see it.

I think the real trophy specs are in the Nipigon. KWP and I fished it a couple years ago and he got a 23″ fish over 6 lbs. I know the guide we used has seen fish up to 25″ in the 8 lb range. The numbers there were significantly less but we caught some absolutely gorgeous fish. We fished it right after that massive rain storm in Duluth where the seals got loose so we had high water. I think we would have caught more with normal water levels. The power of the Nipigon however was truly impressive.

We tried to do a short trip to one of the Albany tribs last year but got stymied by the weather and couldn’t fly out so we had to bag it. From what I read on the Albany it’s time of year dependent. Sections will hold specs until the water gets too warm. They’ll migrate to the cooler tribs unless there’s enough spring exposure.

I had to track down that pic. That Nipigon trout was on steroids.

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Heck of a speck

Looks like a little slice of heaven up there! Great pics.