Monday, February 6, 2012

Blue Lake, snowshoe style

Hey the last time I tried this - hiking in over snowbanks - it worked great and I caught some big brook trout a few feet from shore, though that was a different lake.  But I've been paddling this tube around Upper Blue Lake for an hour or so, scanning the overhanging mounds of snow beween the willow bushes on shore, probing with a big Bird's Nest to imitate a dragonfly nymph, and I still haven't found the inlet stream.

When I started out, the camp host told me some nice cutthroats had been caught near the inflow stream, and though I had checked that a stream was shown entering on the west shore in the De Lorme atlas, I must have failed to remember exactly how far round the lake it was!  Finally I change to a black woolly bugger and count the Type 3 sinking line down really deep.  As I'm paddling through the depths at the mouth of this bay I miss a tug, then land a planted rainbow.  He goes back, and on we go.