Took the end of the past week off to head up to Haliburton for a 1.5 day trip. The plan was to hit two lakes: the first, Thursday afternoon targeting walleye and the second, the full day Friday meeting Nick (mykola) for lake trout and whitefish.
My friend and I arrived at the first lake around 2:30pm Thursday. It took us about 30 minutes to reach the pin I had marked out in 30' (~400m from our shoreline access point), 2'-3' of snow with variable slush. Even with snowshoes, it was exhausting. We fished from 3:30pm-6:30pm and caught 1 small walleye and an incidental OOS smallmouth bass that barely fit through my 6" ice hole. Not as productive of an afternoon as we had hoped for but it was good to get out and squeeze in some fishing day one.
Friday morning the wind was already gusting by 6am, we knew we were in for a windy day. The second lake was slush-free but the knee depth snow drifts ensured we were exhausted just the same. Took our time anchoring down the pop-ups, one of those days that every last anchor was used.
We set up from 45'-68' but our most consistent marking came in the 50' range. First fish of the day was an over slot lake trout, the vertical line on my graph was so straight I initially thought it was just interference:
An hour or so later Nick landed a near identical lake trout to mine, caught on a pink Simcoe bug:
We caught a few more slot and under slot-sized lake trout mixed in with some white-knuckle wall-holding during gusts of wind.
The whitefish were less active but Nick managed to coax one up right at the end of the day, chartreuse sealed the deal:
Deep Snow & High Winds, Haliburton February 6th-7th
