Early spring 2020 lake trout fishing on Flathead Lake

On Flathead Lake today the wind was calm, the temperature was mild, and Brian Jahner and I caught a lot of lake trout. The first picture isn't the biggest lake trout I caught, but Brian was available to take a picture of it. In the second picture, Brian kayaks past Bird Island, with the north end of the Mission Mountains in the background.

Great pictures - grew up there, love seeing it again.  My folks told me they had snow in the mountains, which is awesome for April - looks like a fair amount.  Way to go on that mack!

Until yesterday we obtained our internet service from CenturyLink, which provided a miserable 1 mb/sec.  My wife found this slow service frustrating and totally inadequate for working from home, and banned me from using the internet while she was working because my internet activity slowed up all of her actions even more.  So yesterday we switched to Spectrum, which is giving us 114 mb/sec internet service.  I was looking forward to doing some serious internet browsing with the help of this terrific internet speed.

But then I learned that several major meat packing plants have closed down because many of their employees contracted COVID-19, and that these closures may soon cause meat shortages.  So rather then spending the day hunched over our now smoking fast computer, I felt it was my patriotic duty to help protect our country from meat shortages by catching a whole bunch of lake trout.

It was a beautiful warm day, with light breezes and flat water, and I caught a whole bunch of lake trout, including two 27 inch fish.  But all I could think about was how I would have preferred to spend the day looking at YouTube videos, or whatever.  So as soon as I had done enough fishing to satisfy my social responsibilities, I headed for home, and am now ready to enjoy our new blazingly fast internet service.

That's some good fishing!  Thanks for sharing!

-Mark-

On May 7 I found dense schools of lake trout holding in a small area with ridges, gullies, and drop-offs at around 130 feet. I kept 19 medium sized lake trout, and tossed back three small ones, all of which I caught in an area about 30 yards in diameter.  There were other groups of lake trout in the area, but the fishing was good enough in my hot spot that I didn't have any incentive to work on other areas. I gave some of the lake trout to friends, and smoked the rest.

1. Lake trout fillets cut into portion-sized pieces.

2. Brining the fillets in ziplock bags.

3. Drying the surface of the brined fillets by putting them on smoker racks in front of a fan for about an hour.  Wet fish doesn't absorb smoke well.

4. Fillets in the smoker.

5. Cooling the smoked fillets in my refrigerator to prepare them for vacuum packing.

6. Vacuum packed smoked lake trout, ready for the freezer.

Nice to see you sacrifice your time kayak fishing to alleviate the meat shortage! 

Really enjoy reading about your fishing successes on Flathead. My daughter is at school in Montana - might have to bring my revo next time we visit out there.