Midsummer lake trout are not out of reach; here’s how to catch them

When May arrives each year and Minnesota’s closed fishing seasons re-open, inland lake trout fishing begins. Lake trout are found in shallow waters in the spring, accessible to anglers at a variety of depths.

But as spring turns to summer and summer days grow warmer, the water column within the lakes where lake trout reside warms to match, and the process of stratification begins to establish layering. At the top of the water column is the epilimnion. It’s here where the water is warmest, but also holds plenty of dissolved oxygen due to the gas exchange happening at the air and water interface.

In the middle is the metalimnion or thermocline, the zone where temperatures change rapidly. The bottom-most layer is the hypolimnion. It’s here where cold waters, which have the highest density, sink to the bottom and dissolved oxygen is lowest.

As summer progresses, the layers shift as the epilimnion warms. Lake trout respond by going deeper to find their preferred temperatures. They’ll hang at depths with suitable oxygen and are often cruising in open water, looking for their preferred schooling prey, ciscoes.

The later into summer, often the deeper lake trout are found, with the pattern reversing and lake trout being found shallower only as cool, late-summer nights set in and chilly fall days drop temperatures. The inland lake trout season closes at the end of September. Come October and November, lake trout spawn when water temperatures drop below 50 degrees.

Minnesota’s 116 inland lakes that contain lake trout include a fair amount of overlap with the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota. Fishing out of a canoe presents its own challenges, but the challenges can be amplified when trying to present baits to lake trout at great depths.

Thankfully, a variety of depth-assistance tools are available to canoe-bound lake trout anglers. And for anyone not bound by a canoe, there are scaled-up versions of depth assistance that work on inland waters and Lake Superior for getting your baits in front of lake trout.

Knowing what depth to set your baits is important for catching lake trout. You also need to know at what depth your baits are running. A couple of gadgets can help take the guesswork out of your efforts.

First, a good depthfinder tells you depth. You might also mark some lake trout and some bait and have an idea of where to put your baits. A great option for BWCAW lakes is a combination depthfinder and chartplotters that include automatic chart building.

With automatic chart building, you can create a map of the lake as you fish it, particularly if you make enough passes or transects through an area. In time, you build reliable depth lines and you can make out specific structural features and better know how to navigate around or over areas that are more likely to hold fish, such as reefs or points.

Second, get yourself a Fish Hawk TD (est. cost, $199). This device can be clipped to a weight and dropped to the bottom of a lake. After retrieving the device, you can toggle through some basic LCD screens and it will read out depth and temperature, helping you get a vertical profile of the lake in order to determine the depth at which the thermocline sets up. Fishing at or just above the thermocline is a good bet for catching lake trout.

Consider your line first

Nothing teaches the concept of drag quite like trolling in open water. The thicker the diameter of line, the more drag you’ll take on and the more your presentation will rise. Thinner lines help you get down farther in the water column for the same amount of line you pay out, but those lines come with trade-offs, including a lighter breaking point should you hook a large fish or snag bottom.

To minimize line diameter, you can fish with braided line, but understand that braid has no stretch. And when trolling for lake trout, you need to have some ability to compensate for a lake trout making a powerful run or doing its signature head shake after being hooked.

A well-set drag on a reel can compensate, as can a moderate action on a fishing rod that will bend in the top 30% or 40% of the rod. Another option is to use monofilament line and use its give and stretch to offset an unpredictable fish squirming to throw the hook. If you use braided line for minimized line diameter and the ability to get a bait down deeper with less line put out, make sure your rod action and reel drag are properly set to give way should you hook the bottom or a fish.

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Line counters, depth charts

While not an absolute requirement, trolling for lake trout is much easier if you know how much line you have out and how far down your baits are.

How much line you have out is easily solved with a line-counter reel. How far down you are can be calculated by using a depth chart, typically included with most depth assistance devices and on deep-diving lures.

Leadcore

Another way to get a bait down is to use a reel spooled with leadcore fishing line.

For the fairly common 18-pound leadcore fishing line, you can reasonably expect to get about 5 feet of depth for each color (10 yards) of line you put out while trolling at or near 2 mph. So if you want to fish 35 feet down, you’ll need to put out seven colors of leadcore. If your canoe paddling speed is a bit slower, you’ll have more sink, so if you’re going 1.5 mph, imagine each color dropping around 6 feet.

Leadcore gets you down deep and into fish with the benefit of being able to reel line and the fish right up to the boat. You won’t have to fight swing sinkers or other devices in order to net a fish.

Snap weights

One quick and easy way to get baits down is to use snap weights. If you follow the dive charts for the size and trolling speed of the weight, it can tell you the depths that you can achieve.

Attach a snap weight of 3, 4, or 5 ounces about 20 feet in front of your bait and you can swim your baits much deeper. Just know that you’ll need to detach the snap weight when you’re reeling in a fish.

Trolling weights

An inline keel, streamlined, or banana-style trolling weight is another great option for getting baits down. Anywhere from 3 to 8 ounces will help take a bait to greater depths. If you start banging bottom at your trolling speed, take in some line to get your rig off bottom, but note the depth on your depthfinder so you can decipher at what depth your baits are running.

When you do hook a fish, take care once the fish reaches the surface. A keel trolling weight flying around can create slack in the line, and many trout are lost if they get leverage, move the trolling weight around, and create slack in the leader, then flip off. Land fish quickly!

Downriggers

Cannon makes a mini-troll manual downrigger that allows the use of it on a canoe or kayak. I was gifted one of these by a friend, along with a 2-pound ball, but have not yet used it in the BWCAW. I don’t troll at fast speeds in a canoe, but I do worry what might happen if I were to run into a reef, even at a couple miles an hour!

For precise depth control, it’s hard to beat a downrigger. You’ll need to pack a rod holder with a rod designed to load up and take the slack out when a fish bites and trips the release.

Trolling in canoes

When fishing out of boats, maintaining a steady speed and heading is fairly simple. In a canoe, it’s much more challenging. With variable winds, paddlers needing breaks to stretch or drink water. Given uneven exertion while paddling, maintaining a steady speed and direction can be rare.

For this reason, consider using the lightest spoons possible, so that they will still flutter and dance at slow or trailing speeds. You can also consider using neutrally buoyant jerkbaits. If a canoe’s momentum is stopped, a neutrally buoyant jerkbait will hang in place tantalizingly for a laker, instead of falling or rising out of the strike zone.

Consider, too, the remarkable eyesight of lakers and add a fluorocarbon leader on every line you troll.

Jigging

When conditions are right – like a light breeze or a still day – and you know lake trout are hanging on or near a specific feature or area of a lake, it’s hard to beat the excitement of jigging. Half-ounce to 1.5-ounce jigs with plastic minnows or hair tied to the hook are great for bringing up and down the water column, in and around the thermocline, and all over.

Expect fish on the fall, so control the line on the drop so you can feel if a fish picks up the bait. When you least expect it, a tremendous thump will wake you when a lake trout strikes your jig. Jigging next to islands, as well as over reefs and adjacent drop-offs, is a great way to hook lakers.