Yesterday, some fishermen came from the Lansing area (and brother from Texas) for the 2nd time in 2 years to do a little trolling on Lake Superior.
I woke up my deck hand, Andy, at 6 am after having my own coffee and breakfast ( I thought I’d let him sleep as long as possible so he got his beauty rest). All he did was moan and roll over complaining how tired he was. I decided I really didn’t need a first mate anyway since I prepared the boat the night before and my clients were somewhat experienced with down rigger, dipsy diver and planer board trolling from a previous trip. Also, it was to be a calm day, so the autopilot could handle the steering of the boat. (know anyone interested in filling in to deck hand sometime? The pay is low, but the fun is HIGH!)
The lake was a little foggy as we approached the channel, so I had to turn on the radar to “see” where I was going, but when we went half way through the channel, I saw that Lake Superior was clear.
We set lines immediately with orange dodgers and flies, green spoons, pink spoons and a couple FinnAction Lures and trolled between 1.8 and 2.4 mph. The water temp was in the mid 50’s near the shore and low 50’s farther out, but neither the Coho nor Steel-head were in the area, so we pulled the lines and went deep for Lake Trout.
Had a little down rigger issue on number 4, which was easily fixed as we trolled. (good thing I had a few extra fuses on board).
Caught our lake trout on green, one of which was the Calvinator and also a brass, red and pink prism number 5 spoon. (FinnAction Lures) I’ve been setting my spoons only 5 to 6 feet behind a home poured 11 lb ball with a big square tail that has green prism and glow tapes applied. See my post on this set-up here.
Water depth was mostly 170 to 210 and all the fish were in the 2.5 to 5 lb range. Caught one on a dipsy set-up with 300 feet of braided line out with a deep diver5 inch disk. It will dive to about 120 with this set-up, so this was a suspended fish. We also saw some suspended, and were running a dipsy around their depth, but no bites on that one.
I’m tying up some new spin and glows with glow beads and silicone skirts to run behind dodgers for more action on the next outing.
This is the Texan with one of his Lake trout. (and he thought tuna fishing on the ocean was more exciting)
Brian Helminen
