Grocery store owner, Jim, and his wife ICU Nurse, Beth, came all the way from their cottage in Watersmeet on Thursday night to fish on Friday for Lake Trout. They had a nice overnight stay at the Lac La Belle Resort.
Jim had wanted to fish on Lake Superior for a while and finally googled Copper Harbor Fishing and came upon my website.
I headed out to an area just East of Point Isabelle and set my first line, but before I could get a second one in, my first down rigger snagged into an old abandoned gill net. A few minutes later, I had recovered all my gear, marked the spot with a weight and jug and again set lines. We caught only a small laker there so we pulled the lines to go out to a different “hot spot.”
At the end of our fishing, after releasing a foul hooked laker and a small one, we came in with 7 nice healthy, orange meat lake trout.
Saturday was an off day for me since it was a little windy and Sunday afternoon I had 5 guys from various places, including Houghton/Hancock area, Northern Iowa and Indianapolis. Forester, Robert arranged the trip with me a few weeks ago and got lucky with a very nice, warm and relatively calm day. The fishing was good too, as they went home after catching 2 lakers each, a total of 10 fish. The first fish aboard the Fishin’ Mission was a small 2 lb lake trout, which they thought was a big fish, at least compared to what they were accustomed to catching. The largest was a 10 lb, 28 incher and was still a pretty lean fish.
For lures, we dragged a few FinnAction Lures on dipsy divers and planer boards, plus a 6 inch dodger with homemade spin-n-glows. The dipsy divers and planer boards were un-productive even though we saw some suspended fish around 80 feet down. On the down riggers, we fished the bottom from 110 feet down to 200 with dodgers and green spin-n-glows with a green skirt and glow beads. I’ll try to get a picture of the set-up posted later on as I think other could benefit by duplicating it.
It’s too windy to fish effectively today, but we are going on cruise by the Mendota Lighthouse and into Bete Grise.
Brian Helminen
