Another late post, got out last minute for the day on Tuesday after a friend asked if I could get the day off late Monday night. We left the city around 3:45am and got to the launch at the lake for 7am. The lake was glass with the slightest breeze rippling the surface:
We headed to a location on the lake that Nicholas (mykola) and my friend have fished in the past. A 30'-40' flats off an island that the whitefish roam, now in the midst of summer we were interested to see if they would still be there. The surface temperature of the lake read 23.5 degrees celsius.
About an hour into fishing the first spot, I had a mark appear behind a suspended school of smelt. I reeled up to the mark at 20' and as I passed it, I felt weight. An aggressive whitefish to start the day taken on a 1" white soft plastic minnow:
After slowly making our way further north along the flats, my friend landed a whitefish, this one just off bottom in 42':
Another a few minutes later:
We fished the flats until noon and hooked into a few other whitefish that ended up getting off half way up.
By 1pm things had slowed down significantly so we decided to scout some deep water in search of suspended lake trout. We tried a variety of mid-lake structure from 60'-100' with the odd uninterested mark showing up.
With an hour or so left to fish before we needed to leave, we decided to try a 40' shoal beside a steep drop off into a 125'+ basin. We were quickly back above suspended whitefish again and after missing a few, my friend hooked into what we at first thought was a foul-hooked whitefish...
15 minutes later, after 4 or 5 runs, he landed a beautiful lake trout, measured at 67cm and released. Caught on the same 1" white soft plastic minnow the whitefish had so eagerly been chasing around.
The last thing many smelt have seen:
We fished for another 30 minutes and my friend caught one more small lake trout for the cooler at which point we called it a day.
July 23rd Whitefish & Lake Trout, Hot weather coldwater species
