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inkubus
Member since April 2010Recent Activity
How to get 'em hooked
Steve Mills, a field staff volunteer for The Angler's Atlas, offers a few pointers that might help encourage kids to join in early-season angling when the ice is just off many Alberta lakes: To keep kids interested in fishing we have to give them action. To this end here’s an Alberta stocked pond or lake trick. -Alberta is a put-and take-fishery, so they stock inexpensive natural rainbows. -Any trout that winters over thinks it has to spawn at ice off and looks for gravel to do so. -Unfortunately/fortunately there is no gravel in most stocked ponds or lakes in Alberta. Finding a roadway near the lakeshore from which gravel has washed into the lake can present a goldmine of action for a young angler. I discovered a small wash off a roadbed four years ago and decided to try my theory, assuming there was gravel washed into the lake. As I was setting up my fly rod, a group of locals pulled up on either side of me and announced that they occasionally 'played' with fly rods but today was serious meat-fishing. I dead-drifted a mini-leech two feet under a strike indicator and started hitting nice rainbows pretty much every cast for an hour-and-a-half. At trout No. 15 I was surrounded by a quartet of meat fisherman demanding "What the @**! are you doing?" and "What’s that orange thing on your line?!" At trout No. 22 I realized that, while I had never experienced a northern Alberta lynching first-hand, I definitely did not want my first experience to be as the guest of honour. I departed rapidly. This would probably be less of a threat to a youngster placed on such a gravel spot with a spinning rod, small casting float and a beadhead mini-leech. Kids develop a lifelong interest in fishing with this kind of success. Next? Teaching young kids to fly fish the easy way: Don’t use a fly rod.
Chasing the ice away
Steve Mills, Angler's Atlas field staff volunteer in Grand Prairie, Alta., wasn't waiting for the ice to melt at Figure Eight Lake on May 11: Drove to a favorite stocked lake a couple hours north of Grande Prairie. Arrived at 2:30 pm. Ice was still on my favorite bay, but the main body of the lake was open. We fished ice edges successfully and the bay opened at around 3:30 p.m. After a slow start due to my wife lying about the colour of mini-leech she was using to out-fish me, we went on to land 20-plus rainbows ranging from 1-4 lbs., as well as missing an equal number. We were casting from shore, dead-drifting brown beadhead mini-leeches 2 feet under the strike indicator. This works at all the stocked lakes in this area for most of May. At around 4 p.m. the wind in our faces pushed a chironomid hatch into our bay with an accompanying large school of trout. Stayed with the mini leeches rather than switching to ice cream cones, and the trout continued to bite. Most of the fish are very silvery, making me wonder if triploids are being stocked here.