Fly Fishing Maligne Lake Part 1

Jasper National Park has several outstanding fisheries. Maligne Lake is one of them. Maligne Lake is a long lake, almost 22 km long and many of you have seen the beautiful view of Spirit Island well down the lake. Karen and I fly fished Maligne two years ago and we finally had a chance to go back. The weather was fantastic and we were surprised to find out that chironomids were still hatching. We decided to use our canoe to get around. I rigged up oar locks on the bow and stearn of our 18 foot prospector canoe so we could use anquors. We easily paddled the canoe to likely looking spots on the lake and I used my Garmin sounder to find drop offs and potential structure to fly fish. Maligne is a deep lake (318 feet) and looking carefully at a map helped us decided where to go. Maligne has both brook trout and rainbows. The lake is in Jasper National Park about 45 km from the town of Jasper. There are campsites on the lake that you can book from Parks Canada on line. Maligne is at an elevation of over 5000 feet.

Karen and I drove to the lake from Red Deer. After an early 5 hour drive, we loaded up our canoe and camping gear. We had great conditions for both camping and fly fishing. After finally getting to our camp area, we set up our tent, stored our food in a bear bin and finally we were able to rig up and set off fly fishing. We set up with small leaches and CBOs (Canadian Black and Orange). As we set up, we could see chironomids on the surface and several emerging. We quickly changed over to size 16 black and red ice cream chironomids. We used weights to drop our chironimid down to the bottom and then set our strike indicators so our chironomid was about 12 inches off of the bottom. We then took off the weights after we adjusted on strike indicators. It did not take long for us to hook up with both rainbows and brookies. We stayed with the tiny chironomid for the next day as well although we tried several different locations. Our sounder was quite valuable to help us find structure, i.e. drop offs and the 14-20 of water we were looking for. To say we had a blast was an understatement! Take a look!