Lake trout on the fly is a lot of fun and extremely challenging because there are so many factors in success! We have several lakes in Alberta that have lakers and they can be tough to catch! Yesterday; Rick, Doug, Larry, Ken and I headed off to try to target lake trout. The weather has been cool and we were hoping that the water temperature would be down so we could have a chance of catching a few before they head deep for the summer!
Lots of fishermen troll for lakers. That can be a great strategy too! Lakers love to follow a streamer for a long time before striking! I have friends that catch lake trout by dangling with balanced flies with full sink lines.
Lake trout can be shallow early in the season and they will target chironomids, callibaetis nymphs and caddis larva like other trout! If the water warms in the shallows, the lakers will not be there. They like the water to be cold. Well after launching my Yamaha G3, we motored to a spot and set up. The weather was not nice. It was 6C and rain/hail was moving in. The good news was the water temperature was 53F, pretty much perfect. It took some time to connect with a laker and it was not exactly what we expected. There was a massive callibaetis hatch along with caddis everywhere and small chironomids on the surface. We started with blood worms. We got into a few fish but as we tried different depths and flies, we were surprised to catch a laker on a callibaetis nymph and then Doug started using blobs. Well Doug connected with a 10 pound plus laker that did eat his blob. Interesting enough, he repeated this quite a few times during the course of late morning and the afternoon! Who knew? Rick caught several dandy lakers as well. I set up on several lakers and lost all of them, sigh.
Timing is everything because when the water temperature climbs, the lakers go deep but we learned that the lakers will eat bugs of all sorts. The key is depth and water temperature.
The swallows and other birds we gorging on caddis and callibaetis adults!
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