Missed deadlines

Yup we missed that 24 hour blog deadline, but you're going to have to understand people it's steelhead season, you're not the only ones getting short changed.  It was Christmas, it was New Years week, and oh yeah it was steelhead season, not to mention it was some great winter conditions for the last couple weeks here in WNY. we've experienced everything from a flood like river conditions to sub zero temperatures, with a lot of fluffy powder mixed in.  Great runs of fish and waters where we haven't gotten a tug in days, the highs and the lows, an emotional roller coaster.  Now you want a blog out of us too?  Hahahaha yeah I get it. 

On top of all this amazingness from Mother Nature we still have to grow the business and fill orders. Tying up flies and steelhead maribou jigs, while josh wraps a cool, custom 9' spin rod for steelie float fishing and a 9' 7 wt fly rod on deck, things are steady, things are growing.  I like it. If you're in the Buffalo/Niagara Falls area the weekend of the 26th of January check out the Niagara Fishing Expo and stop by the booth of Chuck Booker for a chance to win said fly rod.  Chuck will be giving this rod away with a paired reel to benefit the LOTSA pen rearing Program for the salmon and steelhead of Lake Ontario. This is not only for a great cause, but a chance to win an original GTO Outdoors fly rod. 

Also in the works we are still working on getting our website live for you all to enjoy. 

Www.gtooutdoors.com is slowly but steadily becoming a reality. You'll be able to view videos, check out photos of team GTO in the field or on the water, shop for original GTO products, and set up trips with our company. A lot of information to get out to you with a lot of roll outs in the coming weeks and months. Exciting times in the GTO kingdom indeed.  So with all of this said we will try to at least write a blog once a week this year and keep you all updated and in tune with our lifestyle. 

So until next week or maybe even before I bid you tight lines and good fishing my friends 

Billy

Blog 1/52 for 2014

Recipe:Butterflied Venison Tenderloin Steaks

Here's one that team GTO will definitely be making this week at camp. A simple yet tasty way to prepare your harvest this fall.

Ingredients

1 venison tenderloin cut into 3/4 inch butterfly steaks
1 cup Speide Sauce (check your grocery store's marinade aisle)
2 tbsp sea salt and pepper

Cut your tenderloin into 3/4-1 inch venison steaks and place into a sealable freezer bag with 1 cup of Speide Sauce marinade. Seal bag and make sure sauce in liberally applied to all the steaks. If more is needed add more sauce. Place steaks into the refrigerator for 2-3 hours. Light your charcoal or propane grill, preferably hardwood charcoal. When grill is ready take out your steaks and liberally apply sea salt and fresh cracked pepper to all the steaks. 4-5 minutes on each side until your reach a nice medium/medium rare and pull off the heat immediately. Serve right away either naked or with your favorite sauce. A nice chimichurri would be wonderful over the platter of steaks.

The next time you harvest a beautiful white tail or elk try this one out

Cheers

Billy

The Salmon Run

One can't explain the craziness that I experience during the annual fall Lake Ontario salmon run. I don't know if its the acrobatic aerial displays that the fish put on or the screaming of my fly reel. It could possibly be the fight, oh the biggest fight felt from any game fish in the WNY area. This year has been no different. The salmon started entering the Lake Ontario tributaries in the beginning of September and have really started coming upstream now that the evening temperatures have started to drop. We have been seriously filling our sickness, I mean addiction to these beautiful fish for two weeks now. Lots of hook ups, lots of broken lines and leaders, and one straightened hook have paid off a couple of times when team GTO has had the pleasure of not only landing the salmon, but and early run beautiful brown trout. While we have mostly fished locally, 18 mile creek or oak orchard, this coming week we will be traveling to the world class east coast fishery known as the Salmon River in Pulaski NY. Reports coming in say we will be hitting the Salmon and the Oswego rivers in the peak of the season. Lots of Chinook, Browns, and Steelhead are being reported throughout the river. Telling this to a salmon addict is like dangling smack in front of a crackhead. Everything I do I cannot focus on, all I think about is throbbing in my forearms as my fly reel screams with line tearing off into the backing. The long drawn out fight and finally if I'm lucky grabbing that huge trophy from the net, twenty pounds plus of muscle that just fulfilled my salmon addiction.
I'll try to get serious about this blog and post regularly again. My partner in GTO, Josh, has also agreed to contribute to the blogosphere. Stay tuned for more stories as we get into our busy season hunting, fishing, and grilling the outdoors. Until then here's a couple picks of some nice fish we've gotten this week in the WNYarea.

Thanks,

Billy

Report from the Genesee River Part 1

Heading out of town on Saturday night there was a certain giddiness, an eagerness.  I could not wait to get to GTO's southern tier camp.  I could not wait to get in the river and stack the browns and brooks up like cord wood.  We would have four guys there was no way we were striking out this trip, there was no way even with two members fly fishing beginners.  We made great time leading our caravan of vehicles down through many small trout towns. Max had arrived first and opened up camp so upon our arrival we plugged in our generator and we were officially in business.  Saturday night may have involved some random hoopla and a few too many drinks, but we were all ready for the next day, the river was alive with trout and the weather was supposed to be beautiful.

Shaking off the previous nights activities we ventured to town for some breakfast and hot dogs, yes hot dogs.  After breakfast it was time, time to venture to the Genesee.  We chose the bottom of the dam in Belmont to start our search from some beautiful browns and brooks.  

I was planning to drift nymphs all weekend and help josh learn how to cast his newly purchased fly rod with some great on water experience.  Gary and Max would be conventionally fishing with spinning reels and jigs and spinners.  They also drifted some Gulp eggs that were recommended by a local at a local bait store.  After throwing the nymph around for twenty to thirty minutes I was being nosey and watching all the other anglers on the river and noticed one gentleman over waist deep in the water right up by the base of the dam catch two nice size browns within 15 minutes of one another.  I started casting and moving up stream, but didn't receive the bite I was looking for.  Walking back downstream to the rest of the guys I stopped by to see how Josh was doing and to give him some pointers while gracefully stepping off the rocks into the river I performed the falling swan dive right into the water.  Good thing it was warm out cuz my right arm and shoulders were soaked.

Ok I may have came in a little hot, but who knew these rocks were so damn slippery

After fishing this beautiful area downstream of the dam for awhile and not landing any fish (Gary had some bites and was having his bait stolen but could not land one) I wanted in on this dam area where the previously mentioned gentlemen were hooking up with nice size brownies.  We took a little break, changed flies to the white/yellowish nymphs i could see floating in the river, and trekked back upstream to the low head dam in the middle of downtown Belmont NY.  Where the dam empties over and another tributary empties into the Genesee Gary and myself attempted to cross out to a stone island out near where I had seen gentlemen landing nice fish.  We were going to go land us some nice size fish and feed all four of us and Syd back at camp on trout all night.  We are the backups for that show River Monsters, we can concur mother nature and her mighty swift currents..... OR not!!!!  Trying to cross the river out to the island I slipped again on some river slime and went completely under.  Gary being right behind me grabbed me and all was good at the moment.  Now to just get back to shore hahahaha. We managed back, I walked downstream a ways to fish in the sun cuz now I was completely soaked.  Wet

COLD

and no fish

Thats how day one goes down

Genesee 1

team GTO 0 and wet

Cooperation

When everyone or everything works in unison incredible things can happen. When variables decide to work against one another like oil and water, disaster is eminent. This week at GTO was a week dependent upon cooperation. Cooperation of schedules, cooperation of conditions, presentations, fish activity, you name it things had to line up like Jupiter and the fifth moon from Saturn for us to land a fish.

We were supposed to have three team members attack to niagara again this week, but come Monday morning we were down to two. Josh and myself made our way to Niagara Falls early on in the day so we were sure not to miss a feeding or any high steelhead activity. A deep freeze had moved into the WNY area late last week and was supposed to have moved on by Sunday before our trip, but here we were lugging our gear down into the niagara gorge in a balmy 20 degree temps with 15-20 mph winds making it feel like 10. As we started our decent we quickly realized ice was going to be a contender today. The river was filled with ice chunks breaking off the falls, but was clear, real clear. The current wasn't too bad and we only had one guest with us today. No boats to contend with, we had 200 yds of the bank to ourselves....

And we casted and we floated and we quickly spent the entire today switching setups and hoping and praying and casting.

We were skunked again, but not only were we skunked the three other guys we seen fishing that day were skunked. I witnessed one fish, a lake trout of ok size was caught by a gentleman during the morning on a huge white and pink buck tail jig. That would be it for the entire gorge that day as we talked to more than a done anglers, from multiple access sites along the gorge. The whirlpool and devils hole were full of ice making any sort of fishing impossible and all the way to art park had no action. Zero. Notta. Not a single fish. Plenty of stories of good strikes, but no one landed a fish but one gentleman? Were we all horrible fisherman? I think not,but if we could we would definitely appreciate some more COOPERATION from all factors involved next week in GTO land.

Sunday schmooze

Tomorrow we take to the river that flows from the Niagara.

We skunked once 7 days before, shame on the conditions.

Silver headed ballet battle is what we strive to achieve.

Run of the drag,

screech of the reel.

Addiction is a disease some say. GTO hopes there's no cure for such a disease.

Afflicted....

So we've been like your estranged brothers

It's true we have been gone for ten months. It's true that we wrote and published one entry in this brand new blog and then ran away to the woods to hunt and fish. You're all right and we apologize. We have decided here at team GTO to take things a little more seriously this year and that includes all of our social media outlets. If you follow along on twitter @grillingGTO you have gotten some updates and some photos throughout 2012, now we promise at least a blog a week so you can follow along at home on our adventures throughout WNY enjoying the outdoors.

So starting things off for the new year in blog land we'll talk about last week in GTO life. We've been fishing hard in the WNY area for steelhead and big brown trout in Lakes Erie and Ontario's amazing tributaries. Affectionately known as part of steelhead alley locals know you can hook up with some amazing fish throughout the winter months. Last week took us to the niagara river where action had been hot for the last couple of weeks with some large steelhead, brown trout, and lake trout haven been taken in the last 3 weeks. Most of these fish in the 6-8 lb range with some exceeding 15 pounds.

Expecting good action after striking out in a complete blizzard the week before we arrived to an mid sixties gentleman battling a beautiful chrome dome. After watching the fight go on and the elder statesman become the victor I was pumped to land me a big ole niagara river monster. There was a crowd of bank anglers and a half dozen boats drifting the mighty niagara and for hours we all enjoyed the beautiful weather and that's about it. Of the twenty guys I watched fish either from boat or bank this morning had the same exact luck, cast and tug, cast and drift, cast and nothing. Except a break in the action, could the feeding be coming,
"gentleman fish on", Gary states
Three GTO guys, two hikers, and a few Canadian geese watched as Gary pulled in an amazing 24-26 inch beautifully gold fish colored CARP!!!!
A carp, middle of February fishing artificial chubs in the niagara river under a float and we walked away with a carp that we graciously gave back.

After this omen we had to move on so we packed up, hiked out of the gorge and moved up north to the amazing little town of Lewiston and fished the niagara gorge below Artpark state park. This location wasn't as crowded and we were all able to have our own little spot on the river as there were only two other bank guys and only two drifters for the mile long area that we occupied. A couple of great strikes and bait taken. A couple average sized chromers landed by others within eye sight, but nothing for team GTO. Another strike out two weeks in a row, but were back on the trail again next week......

Bill