Schooling Lake Trout

I just got back from a three day camping trip:
5 miles around Lake A, then a 4 mile paddle,
wade and drag up a channel to the outlet at
Lake B. I won't say exactly where it is, because despite
its remote location, this fairly well-known spot is already
a but over crowded--seems like a half a dozen hikers make the
6 mile trail hike each day.

The primary attraction here are spawning
Brown trout in the channel, which all seem to be between
16 and 24 inches long. Three and a half pounders are
fairly common. Every once a while a four pounder.
But never any bigger than that. They'll occasionally
eat a soft hackle wet fly, or bang a streamer, but egg
flies are by far the most effective. I put a tin split shot
on the leader about 16" up from the fly.

The reason I'm writing this post is to tell a Lake Trout story,
however.
They too spawn in the fall, and they tend to school up
in pods near outlets and inlets. This particular lake is famous
for the occasional 25 pound laker. We didn't see any like that.
But we saw lots of smaller ones podded up in groups of 50 or so,
holding in fairly shallow water near the bank.

One fisherman after another, during the three days we spent
camping out there, stripped every imaginable streamer over those
fish and never got a bite. "How fussy those lakers were" turned out
to be a common streamside converstation.

But it ain't necessarily so. If you rig up a 7 weight rod with a
loooong
leader and put an egg fly on the end, with a pea-sized tin split
shot 16" up the leader, you can catch one every cast. What just
about everybody was missing was the depth of the water. This high
altitude water was so crystal clear you could see the pattern on the
back of a lost Thomas Cyclone spoon at four feet down. These fish
were schooling in 5-6 feet of water, and the streamer strippers were
pulling their flies along 24" down at most.

With a pea-size (tin) split shot you duck as you cast, pull the line
tight and then count to 20 or so. And then slowly overhand twist the
line through the school. I didn't get a hookup every cast, but I did
get a bump every time. I gave up on the lakers and went back
to the brown trout, after releasing maybe a dozen lakers in two dozen
casts. We konked a few on the way out. They're tasty fish.

Sometimes the right rig and the right technique makes the difference
between total frustration and too easy.