Fly fishing was not supposed to be in the cards today because our Gulf station wagon was getting ready for winter. Luckily getting on the snow tires, an oil change and inspection took only a couple of hours so we had the rest of the day. We took a quick look at the weather, especially the wind forecast and decided that we could spend the afternoon at Sylvan Lake. We enjoy fly fishing for lake whitefish.
We launched at Palm Bay. It is shallow and fortunately for Karen and I, we have Muck boots so we have no problems wading into the water until we can use our electric motor. We motored to the west end of the lake and fished in 8-9 feet of water. We had to move around a bit but we were fortunate enough to find whitefish. As usual we used a small blood worm. Honestly I think you could catch the whitefish with a bare red hook. There were occasional wind gusts but the hills at the west end protected us from the north west wind.
Karen and I remembered how amazing the fly fishing was in the spring. Well today the fly fishing was decent but not outstanding. We enjoyed seeing moose tracks, eagles flying, loons, mergansers and one particular eagle who watched us for the entire afternoon from a low perch in a tree!
The lake whites were fiesty today. We set our strike indicators so our blood worms were from 6-12 inches off of the bottom. We just clamped our forcepts onto our flies and lowered them to the bottom and then adjusted our strike indicators.
Fabulous afternoon. There were a few other boats out but it felt like we had the place to ourselves. As always, getting outside is one of the best medicines in the world!
