In the summer when water temps come up a bit and Lake Superior’s Lake Trout take offense, they go deep and sometimes can be hard to get to hit. That’s when I change tactics. Anyone who fishes Lake Trout knows that staying ready to switch approaches quickly is often the key to success. Here are a couple of my approaches.
Everything started with the spinner similar to what’s shown on the left side of the picture. I make this spinner just for casting Lake Trout on Superior. Its heavy and casts a mile. While in the boat one day we marked a stationary pod of trout in deep water and we were wishing we had some jigs along. I had tubes in a bag, but not a single jig in the boat. I got to thinking about this and snipped the clevis and blade off a spinner shaft and ended up with something like the unit you see on the right. This got slipped into a tube, just like the rigged bait you see in the middle of this picture. I tied the rig on a softer dipsy diver rod without a dipsy and dropped it down to where those trout were hanging and instantly was into a fish. My boat partner cut up a spinner in the same way and both of us filled on trout in 20 minutes.
Since that day, I have made several dozen of the inserts to use with a variety of plastic baits and made a couple changes along the way. One change is that I always add an orange bead or two between the hook and the body weight. On spinners I make specifically for the trout I do an orange dip on the back 1/2 of the lure body. Orange and gold would be the color combo of choice if I could take only one fishing on Superior. On the insert, the other change is to use a very large hook. The hooks shown here on the inserts are #2 Gami’s and have been just about ideal in size.
The insert is fairly heavy, about 5/8 ounce. While they work well vertical, they have proven themselves while casting too. In fact, the largest laker I have caught fell to a tube/insert while casting the breakwater in Two Harbors. The tube, as shown works great, but the hollow-bodied swim baits with the thumper tails from 4 to 5 inches long can be rigged the same way and do just as affective of a job. I carry both. The spinner shown is about 1/2 ounce and is one of my absolute best baits for Lake Trout while casting and the color lends itself to salmon too. When I start to see very small trout hitting other baits while casting, I will switch to the tube rig and bounce the bottom and the rocks. The rigs are part of the boat tackle now too and we carry two rods, 7 foot medium casting rods with 5600 Ambassadors spooled with 10 pound power pro, rigged with a ball bearing swivel and crosslock holding rigged tubes. When those deep suspended fish are marked that won’t chase, we stop and jig. Roughly 70 percent of the time we can convert those idle fish to fish in the box.
These are just a couple of the tricks of the trade that we have re-fined a little for Lakers, but I think any deep water fish that will chase a bait will turn on these or something similar. White, white/chartreuse, red/white, blue/white, smoke/white….colors abound but these seem to work very well. I am real partial to the white/chartreuse shown.
