Yankee @ the Oak with a Porker Brown Trout

[Yankee Troller]

June 22 - We moved our charter this weekend back a few weeks due to a motor that was acting up. Oh, the fishing was less than stellar too! Personally, I wanted to hit the BT up first thing, but we decided to chase the Kings since we heard the bite the previous two days yielded a couple nice ones.

We set up in 100’ of water pointed NW and trolled it out to 180’ before turning it back in. All we had to show for our efforts were some Lake Trout. After a few hours we decided to head in to check on the Brown Trout. As we were getting into 40’ of water our Starboard diver fires out 35’ on a 3 pulling a Stigner Sea Sick Waddler. After some flips and a few short runs we put the net under a 13lb Atlantic. This was one of the best fights I’ve ever seen out of an Atlantic. A few minutes later in Brown Trout waters the other diver starts thumping out 25’ on a 3 setting pulling a Stinger Stingray Glow Alewife. A few minutes later and we slid the net under a porker of a Brown Trout weighing close to 15lbs. We put him gently in our new Grizzly cooler, and figured we were going to put a whooping on some fish in these waters after hooking two in 15 minutes.

The picture in 15-25’ was great with bait and hooks. The temps were perfect in the lower third of the water column. No one was around, so we were just chomping at the bit looking for some more monster Brown Trout that no one ever bothers with out West. Granted it was 10/11am, but we had a full moon. Well, we fished in there for 2 more hours without a touch. Finally, on a lure change a Brown Trout came up and whacked a new Stinger Stingray UV Chicken Wing right as my brother was going to lock it into the downrigger. That would conclude our day of derby fishing.

June 23 - We left the dock around 7am and figured we’d try the Brown Trout thing out first down East. The water East seemed to be a few degrees warmer, so we had to push out a little further, but the bait and hooks were still there. However, the cottonwood on the surface made it impossible to fish those waters. We tried it for an hour but having to clean lines constantly, and the lack of bites, made the decision easy to head out to see if any Kings were around.

It took some time to change out leaders, and put a whole other program down, but once we did the Lake Trout were like those little annoying ankle biter black flies. You couldn’t keep them off! We continued NE out past the fleet because we knew all they were catching were Lake Trout. The screen got good again in the 250-300’ range off Eagle Harbor. There was a lot of bait in the top 80’ with a few hooks around it. However, all we could manage was a nice 8lb Steelie on a Dreamweaver UV Lemon Ice down 60’ before we called it quits around 11am.

[KJ pluggin]

Awesome looking brown, nice!