Give or take a power outage at the Saturday night climax, you’d have to say the 27th annual Owen Sound Salmon Spectacular was successful again.
Certainly successful for local anglers Jayson Dixon & Mark McPhatter who landed the biggest fish.
While the Sydenham Sportsmen Association has grown this event into a terrific community festival, at the very heart of the activity, it’s still a fishing derby.
The winning weights were 24.11 pounds for Dixon who won the Salmon Division and 18.56 pounds in the Trout category which was captured by McPhatter.
Overall, the Salmon Spectacular attracted in excess of 3,500 anglers who combined to land more than 1,200 salmon & trout.
The winning weights were almost as expected, while the number of fish caught was below projections, a testament to a long winter and less-than-typical summer temperatures.
Ironically, the Sydenham Sportsmen members believe this could be a banner September for the sport fishery along the Owen Sound shoreline and on Georgian Bay.
And as September starts, so too does the preparation for the 28th annual Owen Sound Salmon Spectacular with a special focus on how to keep the power on in the tent during the climatic Saturday night.
I’m Fred Wallace