slowly figuring out fly fish lakes for bass and pike.

[somersetian]

Anyone else fish lakes a lot from a boat? I was recently guided by Red Childress for Musky on the Allegheny river and was picking his brain about fishing lakes and he said one thing he sees with fly fisherman is they always have to be casting to the shore at some type of structure, which he explained is a good place to start but if the bites aren't coming its probably because the fish aren't there. More recently I've been starting at the structure at the shore line and working my way out, but there is something frustrating in casting into open water not really knowing or having any inclination if there fish there or not. I think its more of a mental thing than anything. I should prob invest in a depth finder but just wandering what anyone else does? Oh and the musky trip 8 hrs of casting, one follow around 330 pm. That's musky fishing though I guess.

 

[Dave_W]

In my days chasing muskies with conventional gear in lakes, I came to be a big fan of point structure and cabbage patches. In the mid-west, these points were often grown over with bullrushes. The upwind side near the point of the rushes was always a confidence spot for me.

Cabbage patches were even better and these should be noted by FFers. Look for cabbage that isn't too dense. Usually, there's a section of open water, maybe a foot or two, above the top of this vegetation. A large, semi-bouyant fly will fish over this very effectively. Have some big weedless muskie flies as well and you can plumb down into the cabbage as well as the bullrushes. I'm often surprised how few toothy FFers seem to have or use weedless flies.

If you're after these fish, it pays to fish around vegetation. Muskies and pike love to hang out in cabbage and around point structure with bullrushes.

 

[jifigz]

I agree with Dave. Although I haven't fished stillwaters much in many years, sometimes it pays to go out and get away from shore. Obviously depends on the time of year etc, but a good fish finder/depth finder can help a lot. All esox do correlate closely with weedbeds.

FYI shouldn't pike be starting to move shallow again just like they are in early spring? They shouldn't be hard to find or catch. I wish that I had good pike water here, but not so much. Musky are inherently a little trickier for many reasons, one being their lack of population compared to pike.

 

[somersetian]

What Ive been doing recently is fishing the vegetation like I normally would and then backing off into what I think is 5-10 ft deeper water. Tough because most of the time I'm fishing giant reservoirs and I don't always know what I am fishing over but I think I have been picking up more fish fishing deeper. All this talk about fishing from boats and I caught this today fishing from shore at my buddys lake lot. Ill take it.

 

[jifigz]

Nice little northern! Good job buddy!

 

[ocfisher]

I had this conversation recently, about how all I seem to do is cast to shoreline structure. I've been looking around online and finding some maps of the waters I fish showing manmade structures, topo changes, etc and trying to give them more of a try, but still early in the process for me.

 

[sandfly]

sonar

 

[slay12345]

I recently found the Navionics webapp where you can see user created bathymetric maps created from their sonar units.

In the lower left corner of the frame, check that the round "button"has sonar waves instead of topo lines, click it to change from Navionics base maps to sonar charts if not, then zoom into your desired location to see if there is any information you can use.

https://webapp.navionics.com/#boating@6&key=q%7D%7DvFjsmzM