Fallen Water Temps

I was back on the water once again today after a weekend of wetness for another shot at those miserable niche! Andre, Jim & Marcel joined me this morning as we trolled for what seemed like forever, waiting for the reels to fire. The weather was quite cool when we started at 38 degrees and the winds were out of the north at 5 to 10 knots. Water temps had chilled off considerably from Saturday where I had areas at over 51 degrees and now they were closer to 42. Fortunately for us, there was at least some sunshine making the cold morning, warm up quicker. It probably took close to 15 minutes before we had our first rip and Jim was soon fighting a salmon. The skunk was officially out of the boat when I slipped the net under a 16 inch silver bullet and released it into our livewell. In the next few hours it wasn’t fast & furious like I was use to, but we did manage to pick a few here & there. Eventually, we were able to put 3 decent fish in the livewell out of a possible 7 on the line. Unfortunately, 3 of the others landed were on the short side and made their way back to lake to grow up for the next year. Eventually, I had to relocate and try another location further down the lake. We were to troll & cast for several more hours without any more trout or salmon. We did however manage to land several smallmouth bass on flies & jigs in deep water over sand drops and rock piles instead. Some of them were in the 4 pound class and fought pretty well on the fly rods too! After realizing that it just wasn’t going to happen here, I decided to head back to where we began the day and try for a few more salmon for the last hour. With all the floating weeds and debris, it was almost impossible to troll without fouling up the flies as I soon found out. We made several passes over the best areas and all we managed to come up with were pieces of vegetation. It was time to go when the reel finally went off and Andre landed a very nice tree branch! Although it wasn’t what I had expected, we did still manage to boat a few salmon and several larger smallies to make it a worthwhile day to be on the water. Tomorrow morning, we will reconvene and try to put a better beating on the fish than they put on us today!!