Summer is big-fish season—but only if you fish deep enough. Here’s why • Outdoor Canada

You don’t hear it as usually as of late, as you probably did previously —extra fashionable excuses have taken its place— but it Surely’s nonetheless opined by loads of anglers who’ve depressing days out on the water.  It’s the previous wives story that the fish lose their enamel in the midst of summer season and that their ensuing sore mouths trigger them to not eat.  After all, it’s as ridiculous an excuse at the moment because it ever was previously.

We had been having fun with a superb chuckle about this nonsensical fabrication on our latest Doc Talks Fishing podcast with Dr. Christian Therrien, as a result of Chris has sampled some humongous lake trout, smallmouth bass, walleye and pike as much as 50-inches in size whereas utilizing check nets.  And when he has analyzed their abdomen contents, they’ve been full and happy. So why the gnashing of enamel —sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun— about sore jaws and torpid fish?

It’s as a result of the grumblers are usually fishing in areas of the lake the place the water is just too shallow and heat, and never out in deeper cooler sections the place delicate, silvery, oily, nutritious and scrumptious ciscoes are attracting the prodigious predators.  Certainly, as Chris defined within the podcast, whenever you discover the ciscoes —often known as lake herring and tullibees— you discover the largest walleyes, bass, northern pike, muskies and trout.

“We’ve got fashions that may predict the place they’re going to be with unbelievable precision,” he says. “So why cisco transfer the best way they do and the place they occupy the best way to do is a stability of water temperature, meals, predation danger and environmental components.”

Undoubtedly a kind of final key concerns is discovering the place the water temperature that cisco discover most agreeable —between 10°C and 15°C or 55°F and 60°F — converges, connects and intersects with the constructions the place the highest predators are lounging.

“I search for the construction which may maintain a few of the cisco’s prey,” says Therrien.  “They actually prefer to feed on mysis shrimp.  Mysis like to hang around close to the underside they usually will come up within the evenings and feed on the amassed plankton after which head again down. So, if you will discover a backside overlap —a most important lake hump, a shoreline— that intersects with the thermocline, that’s a superb space.”

Therrien says pinch factors and wind-swept areas producing oxygen additionally gasoline the productiveness of the system. So, he seems to be for breezy factors and areas of present that transfer plankton and carbon all through the system. And when he finds a spot the place the ciscoes flourish and thrive, the enormous lake trout, walleye, smallmouth bass, northern pike and muskies are by no means far-off.

The hearken to the whole podcast with Dr. Christian Therrien, who makes a specialty of finding out the habits and habitat of ciscoes, tune into the newest episode of our Doc Talks Fishing podcast in your favorite podcast supplier or click on the hyperlink beneath.