“Don’t Get Stuck (Looking) on the Water” (From Stephen)

August 21, 2006 at 6:59 pm

“Don’t get stuck (looking) on the water”?

I grew up fishing Southern Ontario lakes, Muskoka’s, Kawartha’s and many others and can remember locating myself on the water relative to obvious landmarks like cliffs, points, beaches and other visible clues to where the fish might be living and feeding in the water below me.

But many Yukon lakes don’t have that much variety in their shoreline, and some people I know can get stuck looking “on the water”? instead of thinking “under the water”? for features that will attract and hold feeding fish.

Regular shorelines with little change in topography and similar gradients to the water can lead to a pretty monotonous area to start your search for good fishing locations. I always like to imagine what the mountains are doing as they descend underwater, and use that thinking to plan where I’ll concentrate my efforts.

Recently I had the pleasure of fishing a remote lake with just this kind of repetitive shoreline. If you wanted to troll all day to find the right spots, you could probably troll all day and find nothing at all! Talking with the locals, we learned that the recent rainstorms had been quite substantial; dry creek beds on Thursday morning were flooded with 2 feet of water and gushing by Friday afternoon.

This knowledge gave us a great clue about what might be different underwater, and where we should concentrate our search to find our feeding fish. The amount of new material being washed out from the tiny creeks that fed into the lake was impressive and I could just imagine that there was fish-food flowing in with all that new material too!

We were searching for Lake Trout, and knowing that they don’t really enjoy sun-tanning and hot baths, we decided to focus on the outflow creeks that fed the lake and to further refine our search to the areas far enough offshore that the fish-food being washed off the land would fall into water deep enough to hold daytime-shy Lake Trout;  we were guessing about 30 feet or deeper in this clear-water lake.

Getting down that far meant holding the boat fairly still, so we drifted with the wind-induced current past the outflow stream-several times-and using a jig to sink deep into the dark-water zone. After forty-five minutes and only a couple of bites later we started to wonder if we had misread the situation; but instead of giving up on our thinking and strategy, we shifted locations to try a different outflow creek.

The first drift over the new area and sure enough-tug, tug, tug-a few nibbles; things were looking much more promising. So we concentrated on that location and drifted over several times, slightly further offshore each time until we finally “found the spot”?. About 200 feet offshore, and dropping the jig about 35 feet down 3-4 pound Lake Trout just kept hitting and hitting and hitting.

When everything above the water looks the same, try thinking about what might be different for the fish UNDER the water-topography, runoff, light conditions-or, all three! Have fun, and Fish On! Yukon!

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