I don’t know about you, but 2007 was a rough year at my house. My seventeen year-old daughter didn’t listen to the talk, and now I’m a grandfather. My sixteen year-old son smokes cigarettes and will only wear girls’ jeans with super-skinny legs, which is apparently a uniform requirement for a front-line soldier in the skateboard army.

So I ground my molars down a lot over the past twelve months, and despite all the mayhem, I got out and did quite a bit of fishing. The days on the water helped lower my stress level considerably, affording me valuable time away from ‘battleground zero’ (my living room).

They also taught this old fish a few new tricks and reinforced confidence in techniques that have worked well for me in the past and I know will continue to produce next year.

Though I only wrote one article for The Fishsniffer in 2007, I enjoyed reading other writers’ stories, participated in many spirited discussions on the publication’s Internet message boards, and booked trips for my part-time guide service through the website. The fishing stories and chat helped me escape from the world of teenage drama, and the guide trips helped me buy diapers for my daughter’s baby and pay costs associated with my son’s participation in his high school delinquency team.

So I’ve decided it’s time to give something back to all the great people who helped me keep at least a tenuous hold on my sanity last year. Here are some big-trout photos to keep you warm on a cold winter’s night, and profiles of the lures that caught them, to help you find success in the upcoming season!

Woolly Bugger: If I had to go fishing for trout with only one fly, this would be my choice. The current Orvis catalog offers a package touted to be the twenty most popular flies in North America… and three of them are woolly buggers! The trophy rainbows in the wild trout section of the East Carson River go crazy for a well-presented bugger, and they’ve caught me countless fish on many other waters as well. The secret of this fly’s success is in its versatility; it’s really many flies in one. Take a close look at a basic, black woolly bugger. What exactly is it supposed to imitate? Exactly. It’s a baitfish, or maybe a stonefly nymph, a crayfish, or is it a leech? Dragonfly larvae? Rather than being an exact copy of any one type of trout food, this fly is suggestive of many prey species.

The woolly bugger is generally classified as a streamer, which is a subsurface fly used to imitate a small fish. As such it is usually cast and retrieved, rather than fished with the river’s current on a dead drift. The angler retrieving a bugger can impart endless variations to the fly’s movement as he brings it in, from adding tiny twitches with the rod tip to swinging the fly in the current, to stripping it in as rapidly as possible, one of my favorite ways to trigger large, meat-eating rainbows and browns. The woolly bugger’s fluffy, marabou feather tail reacts differently to each of these techniques, alternately pulsing, waving and ’breathing’ in the water as the retrieve rate is varied.

Never one to slavishly follow tradition though, I have found that although using this amazing fly as a streamer can be highly effective, fishing it as a nymph, in a dead-drift long the river bottom is even more productive! For this technique I usually fish a beadhead or conehead bugger under a strike indicator, as the first fly in a two-fly team. Use your best high-stick or line-mending techniques to keep a drag-free drift for as long as possible, utilizing the bugger’s own weight or adding splitshot on the leader as needed to keep the fly tapping bottom. When your fly is well downstream, your line swings tight and you’re no longer able to maintain a dead drift- swing, batter swing! Your nymph has now transformed back into a streamer, to be swept across the current and then stripped in! In thinking back, the majority of my largest trout on both the East Carson and East Walker Rivers have come on some variation of these woolly bugger techniques. If they didn’t hit the bugger, then they struck the trailing fly tied on a short tippet to the bugger’s hook-bend. This brings me to another suggestion for woolly bugger presentation: if the small, second fly is catching all the fish, resist the temptation to quickly change out your bugger for a new fly. It is my firm belief that in many cases the unique presentation of the two flies you are using is the reason for your success, even though the trout are only biting one of your offerings. Whether it’s the perfect weight of the woolly bugger that presents your other fly at the right depth, or maybe the flash and profile of the larger fly calling over fish that then grow a bit shy and take the more modest offering, if it’s working, keep at it! I have quite a few times seen the removal of the ’non-productive’ woolly bugger result in the end of a good bite. Especially if the smaller fly in your team is only catching you small trout, persevere and believe in the bugger!

Tech Tip: The long, baitfish profile and lifelike undulation of the marabou tail make the Woolly Bugger an excellent trolling fly, whether pulled behind a full-sink fly line from your float tube while you kick along or tied on a short leader behind a dodger and trolled from a boat. If you’re a spin angler, try a bugger on a three-foot leader behind a clear casting bubble, and if you’re a fly tier, try building your woollies on size 12 or 14 streamer hooks. It’s hard to find commercially tied buggers smaller than a size10, and my micro-buggers have proven to be very effective, often outfishing larger streamers as well as smaller ’match-the-hatch’ nymphs. Another tip for tiers is to use peacock herl instead of chenille for the bugger body. This material has a multicolored iridescence that trout find hard to resist, as witnessed by its presence in classic and productive flies such as the prince nymph and royal coachman.

Rapala Countdown: This minnow imitation is best know as a casting lure, which the angler ‘counts down’ as the weighted plug sinks, one foot per second, to the desired depth before starting the retrieve. The technique is primarily practiced in lakes, but on a recent trip to the Truckee River, I threw out a #11 Countdown with my spinning rod on six-pound line, and dredged deep pools to catch several trout, topped by a heavily spotted twenty-one inch rainbow. My favorite application for the Countdown though is as a trolling lure, and this Rapala is one of my favorite plugs on Lake Tahoe for big rainbows, browns and lake trout. The challenge in trolling the Countdown versus floating plugs is that, well, it sinks! You must let out your line under tension or your Countdown will hook the bottom before you even start your troll. Once under way, you will need to keep the boat moving at all times, and steer into deep water or reel in the Countdown if you’re trolling two lines and you hook a big fish that requires you to slow or stop the boat. The Countdown will also troll deeper than a similar-size floating Rapala, and sink even further on the inside of a turn. The same qualities that make this lure difficult to troll though, impart an action that trout just can’t seem to resist.

Tech Tip: Countdowns respond well to upbeat trolling speeds; 2 to 3 MPH is a good start, and a properly tuned #9 or #11 Countdown will track true up to over 5 MPH. An advanced technique for using the Countdown is to troll it along the shoreline, then out into deep water in an area with a steeply sloping bottom. When you estimate that your lure has passed from shallow to deep, put the boat in neutral and let your lure sink for as long as you dare, then steer again for the shoreline shallows. If you wait long enough before putting the boat in gear, your Rapala can drop quite deep, fifty feet or more, and better yet, it will rise back up as you troll, following the bottom contour into the shallows and passing by fish at several depth zones along the way.

Sep’s Sidekick Dodger: This is strictly a trolling lure, or so I thought until a trip I took with client Wayne McGee last fall on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. We met at Lake Forest ramp just outside Tahoe City before dawn, and motored in Wayne’s top-end fishing boat to a spot where I often catch rainbows and mackinaw in shallow water.

We made a couple of trolling runs over shallow, rocky structure using Rapala plugs without success, then stopped to reel in when Wayne hooked a fat, five-pound rainbow on his Countdown while retrieving! A few more passes with the hot lure failed to produce, so we switched to slow-trolling with sidekicks and live minnows, and had a dozen more bites, bringing in eight rainbows from 12 to 19 inches. At one point Wayne had a hit, set the hook and started to reel in, then lost his fish. I told him to reel faster and burn his bait in to see if we had a mangled minnow that needed to be changed, and then just as he told me he thought his long trolling line was almost in, his rod bent over again. “I got another one!” Then the line went slack yet again, and as he started to reel in one more time, we looked out into the calm water thirty feet behind the boat and saw a nice rainbow just under the surface, chasing Wayne’s minnow, darting in repeatedly and sharking on it. Bam! Bam! Bam! We saw each hit and Wayne set the hook as fast as possible, but he just could not connect. In one particularly vicious exchange, Wayne pulled on his rod so hard that the tiny dodger and minnow flew through the air, landing right beside the boat.

“Well, that’s it” I said, but then we looked back out and saw the trout still there, looking angry and alert just a few yards out. At this point I realized that trolling dodgers on spinning gear was more than just great sport. “Throw it back out!” I hollered, and my client did just that, turning a trolling rig into a casting lure as he easily tossed the sidekick and minnow right in front of the waiting fish with my Shimano spinning reel. The lure splashed, the fish turned, Wayne hesitated the perfect half-second, and the fight was on! We laughed hard the whole time as he worked in his nineteen-inch rainbow! And I had just finished explaining that we troll very long lines when working the shallows on Tahoe because the fish are so easily spooked! Oh well, the exception proves the rule.

My recent sidekick catches on Tahoe include a seven-pound rainbow, and this lure also produces large brown trout. In early December I hosted a friend who loves to troll plugs, but after three hours pulling little wooden fishes through the water from my boat with only one eighteen-inch brown caught on an A.C. Plug, I convinced him to switch to metal and meat. He was reluctant at first, and he explained to me later this was because he was picturing huge sets of flashers or lake trolls, like the aptly named ‘Ford Fenders’. When I told him he could use his light spinning rod with six-pound line to troll the dodger I had in mind, he changed his tune, and within 300 feet of the first trolling run, he found himself fighting a seven-pound mackinaw. Then over the next two hours, we both caught five-pound browns! As we were on our last trolling run, my buddy earned a three-species day when he hooked an eighteen-inch rainbow on the same set-up, a Sidekick with a six-pound fluorocarbon leader and live minnow.

Now I’m certainly not saying that the Sidekick is the only dodger I use; I’m also fond of Vance’s, Luhr Jensen, and Shasta Tackle Sling Blades. Hell, I even like a big ol’ string of cowbell spinner blades as an attractor lure at times. It just seems that lately the ’kick has been my go-to lure, and for good reason. Over the past year it has been extremely effective in the shallows of Tahoe, and has also caught me large cutthroat on Red and Blue Lakes, as well as holdover rainbows on Caples,

Tech Tip: Though of course you can troll this lure off a downrigger or lead core line, in the cold, high-altitude lakes I fish my primary approach is to topline the Sidekick, trolling it on light monofilament. At one mile-per-hour with 200 to 300 feet of line out, this dodger will troll over 15 feet deep, perfect for working shoreline structure. Though small lures, soft plastic grubs and trolling flies work well behind this dodger, I primarily use live minnows on Tahoe, and half of a jumbo nightcrawler on lakes where minnows are illegal.

Kastmaster: The name says it all! This aerodynamic slab of a spoon is effective for trolling and even vertical jigging, but it truly shines for anglers stalking the shorelines of high sierra trout lakes. With a full spool of six-pound monofilament on a long spinning rod, a ¼-ounce Kastmaster will cover the proverbial country mile. This lure comes in a variety of colors; my favorite is rainbow trout, but gold, silver/blue and silver/orange are also quite productive.

One way to fish the Kastmaster is to huck it out into deep water and pause, letting it sink like a Countdown before starting your retrieve. In fact, you can seine the water column this way, starting your retrieve as soon as the spoon splashes down on the first cast, then waiting five seconds on your next toss, then ten seconds and so on. Eventually your Kastmaster will touch bottom, and if it hangs up and you break it off, it’s good to be able to say “Bottom, twenty-seven seconds”, then make sure you only count to twenty-three or so when you tie on a new Kastmaster and make your next cast. Casting this way straight out into the lake can dredge up bottom-dwelling trout or nail shallow fish suspending over deep water, but casting diagonally or nearly parallel to the shoreline is sometimes even better. With the amazing distance possible on each throw, you can work the lure through the shallows for so long that your retrieve approximates what a troller can do from a boat. And wherever you choose to toss your Kastmaster, if a steady retrieve is not working, try a stop-and-go cadence. A rapid, sideways sweep of the rod, causing the lure to surge forward, followed by several turns of the reel handle to take up slack as you turn the rod tip back toward your spoon can trigger vicious strikes. And although I’m extolling the virtues of the long cast, keep working that Kastmaster right until you see it in the water in front of you. Trout will often follow the lure in and hit nearly at your feet!

Last summer I hiked four miles to Round Lake, near Luther Pass south of Lake Tahoe, to find the wind so strong that my Panther Martin spinners and Pheobe spoons were thrown off course and nearly blown back in my face. So I switched to my trusty Kasty, and sliced through the wind to hook nearly twenty beautiful Lahontan cutthroat trout. In October, I drove to Caples Lake for an early morning trolling adventure, only to find that I had forgotten the gas tank for my five-horse outboard motor! I thought about just going home in defeat, but then decided to tie on a Kastmaster and toss it a few times from the shoreline at the base of the dam. On my second cast I hooked up, and over the next hour caught six fish: two browns, three brookies, and a twenty-one inch mackinaw. Not bad for a backup plan!

A.C. Plug: Okay, disclaimer here. I get free lures from this company, but I usually buy the above listed products, sometimes even at retail price. The reason company founder Allan Cole gives me lures and lets me serve on his pro-staff though, is because I catch so many big trout on them! These custom-made fish imitating plugs are expensive, and not for everyone. If you’re a casual trout angler, I suggest adding a few more of the lures I’ve already mentioned before you put an A.C. Plug in your tackle box. If however you’re already quite familiar with casting and trolling Rapala or Rebel plugs, you’ve caught some trout, lost a few eight-dollar lures on the bottom and have started to figure out the connection between smacking your plugs on rocks and catching big trout, maybe it’s time to step up.

An A.C. Plug caught the Nevada striped bass record, a 63 pounder brought in by Allan Cole himself on Lake Mojave in 2001. An A.C. Plug also holds the Oregon brown trout record, for a 28 pound fish caught by Ron Lane in 2002. The A.C. caught a 69 pound lake trout from Great Bear Lake last year, and has caught me the majority of my largest Tahoe area lakers, known locally as mackinaw. Are you seeing a trend here?

I actually discovered this lure by accident, when a client gave me a seven-inch A.C. Minnow, which I trolled for about ten minutes at Caples Lake before catching a fifteen-pound mackinaw. This sort of thing seems to happen frequently, where a first-time user hooks a trophy, perhaps a personal best or even a lake record. That’s what spawns such devotion among A.C. fans, but let me be clear, no lure is a magic charm, calling in fish for miles and forcing locked jaws open, despite the claims in the Banjo Minnow infomercials. There are times when trout bite better on other lures, including of course some of the offerings featured in this article. I keep coming back to the A.C. though, because it has caught me so many big fish that just to tie one on inspires confidence. What makes this lure so effective is its unique and patented combination of jointed wooden body and soft plastic paddle-tail. An A.C. Plug in your hand looks like just what it is, a hand carved, hand painted lure. Moving through the water though, it looks positively alive. This lure is offered in a variety of models, sizes and color patterns; I’ve had my best luck on large rainbow and brown trout using the A.C. Skinny in the five and six-inch sizes, but monster mackinaw like their meals extra-large, and for these trophy trout I use a variety of A.C. plugs including the Minnow, Real Trout and Hatchery Trout from six up to twelve inches in length. My largest mackinaw ever was a twenty-five pounder I caught on Tahoe in 2004 on a seven-inch A.C. Minnow, and my best Tahoe catch this winter was a fifteen-and-a-half pound mack, caught on an experimental prototype I’m testing for the company, an eight-inch Triple Skinny.

Most mackinaw on The Big Lake are hooked in deep water on heavy line by anglers using downriggers or two to five-ounce jigging spoons to fish from 100 to over 300 feet deep. There are quite a few charter captains here who pay their bills by catching fish this way, and many more clients who reel in a two-fish limit of macks averaging one to five pounds. Though quite productive, these deepwater techniques are responsible for the stereotype that lake trout don’t fight well, and the origin of the quote “It was like reeling in an old boot.” When I troll A.C. Plugs for mackinaw, I primarily pull them on six to ten-pound test line in shallow water, and the old boot kicks my ass! All of my A.C.’s are Allan’s hand-made versions, but the company has now introduced several new high-quality production models that I will be testing extensively this spring. Stay tuned for more monster mackinaw!

Tech Tip: Large, wild trout in sierra lakes sometimes suspend over deep water, but are most often found in close proximity to the bottom, and prefer rocks, gravel, and submerged wood to flat sandy areas. Although some fish will leave this structure and move long distances to chase down lures, you’ll get many more bites if you troll in the danger zone. This requires knowledge of your lure’s running depth, and close attention to your fish finder to track the water depth at all times. A lure that runs ten feet deep won’t catch a lot of fish when you troll it over fifty feet of water, and a lure that runs fifteen feet down will cost you money if your attention wanders then you look down at your sonar to find you’ve been trolling in eight feet. The trick is to run your lure as close as possible to the bottom for as long as possible, but this takes an attention to detail that is difficult to maintain, and mistakes are inevitable.

“If you never hang the bottom, you’re not tight enough”. This was taught to me by a seasoned trophy trout troller many years ago, and it has proved a valuable maxim. After losing literally hundreds of lures on the bottom though, I finally invested about fifteen bucks in a lure retriever. There are several types available from Bass Pro Shops and Cabelas, and my version works well, saving most of the lures I send it down for in shallow water.

A final tip for anglers seeking to catch more trout in 2008 is to try to appeal to each of the fish’s senses, and this includes the sense of smell. I use Pro-Cure Bait Scents on all the lures profiled here except for the woolly bugger, because the oils in the Pro-Cure foul the marabou tail and ruin its action. On my Countdowns and A.C. Plugs I use Pro-Cure Super Gels, with the Trophy Trout scent my all-around multi-species favorite. This scent is made from tui chubs, a preferred forage fish for west coast trout. Herring Super Gel is also highly effective on mackinaw and Crayfish is favored by wild Tahoe rainbows. When trolling minnows or nightcrawlers I use a Pro-Cure bait injector to load these baits with my own secret mixture of the company’s oils and sauces, and find that this addition brings more strikes, especially repeat hits from wary trout that nip the bait and release a puff of the scent then come back and hit solidly the second time.

So get out there! Try some of these lures and techniques on your favorite waters and increase your catch rate this year!

Spring Forecast: At press time another big winter storm is walloping Northern California, adding to an already above-average snow pack. This is excellent for the health of our fisheries, as the snow melts off and provides pure, cold water for trout growth and spawning over the next year. It also changes the dynamics of our spring fishing. Shallow trolling is a bit slow on Lake Tahoe right now; with all the snow falling on the water the surface temperature is below 40 degrees, and the fish are a bit sluggish. I predict a topline bite for big trout that will stretch into early summer though, as ice-cold water pouring in from snow-fed tributaries keeps the surface temperature down. Free-stone rivers such as the West Walker and East and West Carson might provide an early-season window of fishable flows, but will quickly swell into raging torrents when warm spring weather starts melting snow. This year I would not be surprised if these rivers take until August to settle down to flows conducive for floating-line fly fishing techniques. All this snow will also serve as an insulating cap over the ice on Caples, Silver, Red and Blue Lakes, delaying the spring thaw. It could be nearly July before we see open water in these spots. When conditions finally do let us present our favorite baits to fish in these waters though, action should be outstanding for the rest of the season!

Until Next Time!
Mark (Never Stand In A Canoe) Wiza
Pro-Staff for AC Plugs and Pro-Cure Bait Scents
Email Me!

Mark is a licensed fishing guide offering a small number of fun and highly educational trout-fishing trips in the Tahoe area. Call (530) 545-1475 or mail Mark wiza@fishsniffer.com for details.