In this video my brother and I traveled to New York to try and catch the lake trout!
If you know me you know that char have a special place in my heart. Brook trout have been an obsession of mine for years, being a fish that I’ve chased since I was a child and a native to my home state. And Bull Trout have recently become an obsession of mine after a few trips out west chasing these aggressive fish. So it should come as no surprise that my brother and I made a trip up to New York to film this 3 part series where we chase the biggest and longest living char on earth… the lake trout.
So this entire trip was DIY. I mean I read some stuff online and asked some people for some tips, but I didn’t hire a guide or anything. Which meant that after we got to New York we were taking some massive guesses as to what flies we were going to need to throw and what type of water we were looking for. And to make matters even more complicated the river we were fishing was dirty, which meant we were fishing a new river totally blind.
Our first hour or 2 of fishing was totally fishless. And honestly the entire day might have stayed that way if it weren’t for another fisherman that we talked to. He was a super nice guy and told us he had fished that spot a few days earlier and caught a few steelhead. And it took him about 3 minutes to hook up on a fish just below us, so Andrew decided to go help him land his fish.
Andrew helped him land his fish, which was a really nice steelhead. And then after a few minutes the guy came back up to us and offered us a few of the jigs he was using. They really weren’t too much different then what we had, his were just in some darker and slightly wackier colors. But it was a super nice gesture and it just goes to show you should be kind and helpful to your fellow anglers, because you never know what might happen. And within 10 minutes, I was hooked up.
We were honestly shocked to have even caught a lakert. We had been fishing for about 5 hours and that was only our second bite. Andrew caught that fish at 1 pm and just to be totally honest with you we fished the rest of the day and didn’t get another bite. We did see a nice King salmon swimming along the bank. But that was it. Which further proved that the lake trout we did catch was total luck. But not to worry, because we were up the next morning and ready to see if we couldn’t get lucky on day 2. We figured it couldn’t get much worse than it already was and somehow that was comforting.
As you can see this day wasn’t going well. After that fish we tried for another hour or so and all I accomplished was falling down a few times. So we decided to bail and try to catch some lake run browns since they were supposedly running up in good numbers this year. After scouting a few spots we decided to stand in line at one of the more popular fishing spots just to see if I could prevent myself from getting skunked on day 2.
We found a spot that didn’t have any people and had a few fish. We tried throwing an indicator rig with a streamer below the indicator, but I eventually threw the indicator off so I could bounce the streamer along the bottom
I somehow managed to avoid the skunk by catching that brown trout right before dark. I mean legally I maybe had 15 more minutes to fish. Plus we had seen a bunch of other fish and felt like we could catch more given the time. But the really impressive thing about this video isn’t the brown trout or the steelhead, but Andrew’s lake trout. Depending on how I titled this video you may be wondering why I said there was a rare fish caught, and I’ll tell you. That’s Because Andrew’s laker might be a 1 in a thousand catch. If you were looking closely you saw that his lake trout had its adipose fin, meaning it was a truly wild lake trout. The lake trout in the Great Lakes have been imperiled due to the invasive sea lamprey which kills the fish. In fact they were nearly wiped out at one point and are only kept alive via stocking efforts from states like New York. And although they are reproducing in the lakes and some rivers due to about $20 million dollars of annual sea lamprey removal, wild fish are still rarely caught. If you don’t believe me cruise through instagram, Facebook, or pay attention to the next couple lake trout you catch in New York and I’ll bet they won’t have their adipose fin. Meaning they were stocked at one point. So Andrews fish was an exceedingly rare and an incredible wild and native char that is probably more impressive than the larger fish you’ll end up seeing later in this series. Once we realized that, thanks to my buddy Will, we realized that this fish might mean more and be just as impressive as anything else we’ll catch in a long time. Thanks for watching and I’ll catch you on part 2 of the New York series.
