I feel like I’ve been making up for lost time the last couple weeks and I haven’t had much computer time to share photos and updates. I got back late this past weekend from my family trip to Lake of the Woods where we stayed at Sunset Lodge on Oak Island and aftr 48 hours of being home my darling wife gave me the green light to head to Superior for my birthday. I plan to do an updated report on our fishing up to Lake of the Woods as soon as I throw up some photos and drop a quick report from our Superior trip in an attempt to get caught back up a bit.
So, Lake Superior…. LOVE that lake!
I left the metro last Tuesday night with Ben Brettingen and Pat McSharry and headed up the north shore with plans to hit the water early on Wednesday AM in the hopes of finding some trout and salmon willing to play ball. I’ve got my new WX 2190 rigged out the way I want it now for fishing big water so I was excited to put the new boat on the water and get that first laker or salmon in the net.
Our typically approach on Superior is to stay shallow and target shoreline breaks or shallow off-shore reefs where we’re able to pull segmented lead core lines and spoons behind boards with two lines dedicated as downrigger lines. Depths fished on this trip were primarily in the 40 ‘ – 60′ range with 3, 4 and 5 color lead core sets catching the majority of our fish while the downriggers remained curiously slow until late in our trip when we finally made an adjustment that made a big difference with our catch rates on the riggers. More on that in a bit.
Wednesday AM we hit the water around 5 AM and we were met with fantastic boating conditions with the lake laying flat calm. While I do appreciate those days when the big lake goes easy on us my experience has always been that calm, sunny days with little to no chop can be tough days for putting fish in the boat. And our first day out was no exception. We found we had to run our boards WIDE to get bit with the fish showing an extreme sensitivity to the presence of the boat. Basically if we didn’t have our boards 150’ out from the boat at a minimum we just didn’t get bit. And even at those extreme distances the boards closer to the boat in our spread were far less active than boards further away from the boat.
We did manage to boat quite a fish after swapping through spoons to find the right color combination for the day. I will say this about Lake Superior fish, if they’re anything, they’re INCREDIBLY color selective with color preferences changing daily if not hourly. I like to joke that there’s only one spoon color that can be conclusively ruled out on a trip and that was the color that was hot the last time out!
On this particular day the best spoon colors were bright colors WITH A WHITE BACK. Any bright color would work… orange, green, chartreuse, as long as it had that white back. Spoons with a silver or gold back were all but ignored for the duration of our trip and color combos that have traditionally been good producers for me were noticeably poor producers. (So be it. Off to shop for more spoons I go!)
In addition to the noticeable color preference the fish were very size specific as well. Typically I run a lot of larger spoons (5+ inches) when fishing Superior. But on this trip the fish wanted nothing to do with the larger baits opting instead of 3″ baits which I rarely fish. On this particular trip you either made these two adjustments to color and size AND kept your baits well away from the boat given the calm conditions… or you didn’t catch fish.
Trolling speeds ranged from 2.0 – 2.4 mph and there was little to no sub-surface current to contend with as verified by the Fish Hawk speed and depth probe I had installed for this very purpose when my boat was rigged at SBC – Chip Falls two weeks ago.
Most of our fish on day one were in the 12 – 18 lb range with a smattering of larger fish to keep things interesting. Not our best day on the big lake by any means, but not our worst, either.
One thing we noticed was that the fish were absolutely stuffed, to the point of bursting, with fish flies. And it didn’t matter if it was an 8# fish or a 25# fish… these lakers were gorging on bugs. Many times when we would bring fish to the net these fish would had veritable hand-fulls of bugs in their throats that they disgorged during the fight. Could that have had something to do with the preference for the smaller baits? A well-fed fish likely isn’t as compelled to take on a big bait as one further removed from it’s last meal. But that certainly doesn’t explain the nearly universal preference for white-backed spoons. Surely that white back looks NOTHING like a bug or a mass of bugs in the water. Things that make anglers go HMMMMMM????
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