Lakers on Light Tackle (Trip Report)

I took a trip up north of the border for some on ice action with my favorite species, Lake Trout. I have been doing this for about 10 years now with my dad and his buddies who have been going for over 20 years, but this trip was a little different. It was just my dad and myself along with 3 of my buddies who were rookies and had never even seen a laker, let alone targeted them. To make things more difficult we only had 3 snowmobiles for the 5 of us in the deep snow/slushy conditions and 2 of the sleds blew up the first day. Not exactly ideal when we only have 2 days to fish.

Other than that the trip was a success as all 3 rookies landed their first laker in the first 2 hours of fishing. Nice to get the monkey off our back right away as I’ve seen a lot of first timers come up and not ice a fish, so I was pretty stoked for them all to have immediate success. In our two days we landed between 20 and 30 fish with many more lost; most fish in the 6-10 lb range with a few smaller and nothing big on this trip. We had a really good time and my buddies loved their first experience with the baked trout we ate on Friday night. The close up picture shows a fairly fresh bite mark on a 4 lber; it must have got T-boned from below by a big pike or musky!

For me the highlight was something I’ve never experience before. We pulled up to small a mud hump where we historically have marked lots of baitfish, assumed to be tullibees. So this trip I set up a slender spoon on my 32″ TUC Precision with a 1000 size Daiwa to see if I could ice a few tullies. Wouldn’t you know it 5 minutes into using the light walleye set up I get hooked up, but this was definitely no tullibee! It ended up being a 10 lb 13 oz laker, the biggest of the trip, and super fun to battle on light tackle. The fight was probably around 5 minutes with a few big runs and I was pleasantly surprised in the rod’s ability to handle a hard fighting laker.

Since that fish, I’ve iced 4 more lakers from 4-10 lbs on that same set up. Although probably foolish to use such light tackle, I have not yet missed or lost a fish using it and it makes for a super fun battle every time.

I’m sure I’ll get burned and it’ll end up costing me a BIG fish someday but for now I’ll keep enjoying that big bend in my rod.

NOTE: TUC guys please don’t void my warranty if you read this

We won’t.

We have a few rods that will be better designed for that now as well. We are introducing a few new rods for this season already and doing a preorders for guys who want to save a few bucks.

That is the biggest Laker on the precision thus far though.

Awesome report and pictures.

Haha thanks John, I can’t imagine this falling under the “common sense” warranty though!

In all honestly I think there is something real about how well the Precision keeps those fish pinned. It’s all about keeping tension the whole time and doing that with the Precision was much easier than with my traditional laker sticks. I wouldn’t use it for tube jigs when a big hookset is needed to bury the big single hook but for a small treble it was enough.

I’d love to try a TUC laker rod in the future but I am already plenty set up in actual laker gear, using the precision was just for fun haha

Oh btw I think I found you a new customer last weekend… I was fishing with a buddy who’s never seen a noodle rod before and he wasn’t catching much until I put a 30″ noodle in his hands, he then iced big gills non stop the rest of the day. Needless to say I didn’t get it back from him that day and he was asking how to get one so I gave him your website.

That is great. Word of mouth is the best way to grow in this business.

Thank you.

Nice report, looks like a blast!