A Birthday Gift

Well, it’s finally here! It’s niche season and the beating began today on Lake Champlain. The beating I’m referring to was on the fish and oh how we did just that. With my wife’s birthday only 1 day away, we decided to head to the lake to see if we could catch a few trout & salmon and have some fun. Neither of us realized just how much fun we were about to have as we slid the boat in and headed to our first spot. I’m not sure, but I think it was about 15 minutes into the troll when the first reel went off and we were locked up. While Christiane was bringing in the fish, another reel fired and I grabbed this one. I had a screamer and knew instantly that this was the real deal. I swapped rods when I saw that hers was a white bass and passed her the one with the salmon. After a short battle, I slid the net under the fish and we had the skunk out of the boat! Into the livewell it went and we were officially on our way! It didn’t take too long before other rods were firing and this was the way it was to be, all day long! I don’t think we went more than 10 or 15 minutes between bites at the worst and most of the time it was even less. At one point, it was hard to actually keep all of the lines in the water with so much action going on. Other boats saw this and decided to move in on us making my life difficult! I guess they just wanted to hook up and didn’t care how they did it, so my trolling pattern became almost impossible. I eventually had to leave the area I was catching just to be able to fish properly and soon started locking up once more. This was once again interrupted as some of the other boats saw the action and slid over to where we were catching. All I could do was suck it up, keep fishing and continue catching all around them! Fortunately for us but unfortunately for them, we were the only ones into fish and I’m sure they were wondering what we were doing that they weren’t. In the mix of salmon we caught there were also a couple of nice, bonus brown trout landed that went about 3.5 pounds apiece. In the almost 6 hours of fishing, we probably landed at least 25 fish with about 10 or 15 more either lost or just missed altogether. What a way to spend the first day on the water, just catching & releasing salmon all day long! Water temps reached 47 degrees and the air temps were in the upper 70’s with a light N/E wind.