Trolling for Trout at Deer Creek

Thursday with Shifty on his boat at Deer Creek Reservoir. This is my favorite lake, but the past two years I have not been willing to put my boat in it, they have tagged it as dirty with the Quagga mussel and I don’t want to chance spreading it around. Since I put in multiple lakes in a week it is not worth the chance even though they clean your boat. Shifty knew this would probably be his last outing with the “Yacht” and felt that over the winter any possibility of spreading them would be nil.

We met at his place at 6 am and hit the road. Only ten minutes up the canyon we had plenty of time to stop and get some refreshments for the morning and day. We still it made with about 20 minutes before we could see the lake so we prepared the boat our poles and anything else we could think of. We launched at 7:00 am and that was still 15 minutes before sunrise. It was cold and snowing in the upper hills and mountains around us but we didn’t get any on the lake.

We started trolling right out the ramp. We trolled most of the day with pop gear, trailing triple teasers, rapala’s and worms. The worms were the hottest ticket. We had been in the water about 10 minutes before I got a hit, it was a good one too, but I was too late on the set and the fish got away, I had two more fish hooked up in the next hour and got them close enough to see but lost them. The first actually broke my leader and hook off. The second just spit it out as it seen the boat. Shifty had a fish LDR on him as well using his rapala behind the pop gear.

The fourth fish however was a keeper and we boated another three fish in the next hour or so and then it turned off in the lanes we were running. Shifty took us up into the Charleston leg and we fished with lure in the river channel. I got my last fish on a Rat-L-Trap trolling it at high speed, it turned out to be the biggest of the day. Shifty landed a fish in late afternoon.

The day started out quite cold and dreary but it ended as a bluebird day on the lake. The water was glass most of the day, once in a while it would have a breeze but nothing too hard. We finished with 6 fish in the live well and Shifty took the home to smoke them. Till nest time “Keep It Bent”.