By Nick Simonson
My brother, my brother-in-law and I had ground out a Memorial Weekend morning patrolling the back of our charter boat with our captain Eric and first mate Eli on the glassy waters just off Michigan's Presque Isle. It was one of those "just-too-nice" mornings for angling, where the weather is perfect, and the fish are perfectly fine not opening their mouths. We managed to land about half of the strikes we had on the array of spoons deployed behind the converted Sea-Ray cruiser on a variety of weighted lines, dipsy divers and downriggers, which was a far cry from the captain's usual percentage for those fish along with the king and Atlantic salmon in Lake Huron.
The fish were short striking, and the lake trout we did land were spitting up inky clouds of half-digested midges. As a couple fish hit the deck, the five of us put together our theory stemming from the night before. A calm, clear evening, a big, yellow full moon and a swarm of hatching, half-inch midges likely allowed for the lakers to swim around with their mouths open, straining nature's snack-sized base of the food chain into their gullets, rendering them quite full by the time we hit the water. As a result, they lashed out at our array of lures behind the boat not out of hunger but more likely as a reaction strike and many were only lightly hooked as they thrashed and turned their way to a long-distance release. It would be the tale of the morning.
As the end of our time on the water approached, we were content with our catch and our first trip on the Big Blow, but the bearded man at the helm with a smile and a laugh made a quick audible instead of turning into the marina and finishing our morning, though we were already beyond the scheduled hours for the booked outing. We headed up the shoreline to a tight break out from a tall white lighthouse as he said, "things can change in an instant," hoping to connect with one of the salmon species, or at least fire things up in terms of finishing out our limit of lakers.
As if on cue, two of the planer board rods toting spoons with weighted lines began vibrating violently in their holders, and they were quickly handed over to my brother-in-law and my brother, the next two anglers up in our rotating succession.
"See what I mean," the captain exclaimed!
Indeed I did. And how often had that been the case in my time outdoors? A quiet day on stand becomes a hot mess of adrenaline when a buck shows up out of nowhere. A peaceful walk through the grass becomes a cacophony of crows and color as rooster pheasants flush en masse at the end of the cover. A long hour or two of evening fishing becomes a blur of gold scales as walleyes move in for the dusk feeding binge. Countless instants have made more than my fair share of memories in time spent in wild places.
In sequence my brother-in-law's fish hit the net, then my brother's and as the latter left the water, the third of our planer board rods on the port side jumped and was in my hands before I knew what was going on. Bringing the bright orange rectangle to stern, the diligent mate unhooked it, and the battle was on with the silvery laker in tow behind us. Like previous fish it was barely tagged in the nose with the treble of the bright spoon which I could clearly see, but I kept the pressure on it as it thrashed its open maw along the surface and twisted in the water behind the boat. I backed up to the walkway on the deck and heard the splash of the net and exhaled.
Over the gunwale the rubberized mesh came with a bowed basket beneath the lake trout. While likely not a true triple in the sense of having three fish on at once, it was the perfect end of a three-for-three stretch and a solid cap on a morning of fishing. After a quick photo of our trifecta on La Mer Douce, the rods came in and we headed back to the rocky piers guarding the docks in the marina, content with our catch and another instant to add to our memory books…in our outdoors.
Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.
Featured Photo: Three Lakers. The author, his brother-in-law, Adam Sersha of Silver Bay, Minn., and brother, Ben Simonson of Valley City, N.D. landed this trio of lake trout in an exciting instant at the tail end of their trip on Lake Huron. Simonson Photo.
No comments:
Post a Comment