Friday, January 20, 2017

Shore Fishing Lake Trout Severe Winters

The 10-day forecast offers no promise for any ice fishing. We wait and see what awaits beyond, and it won't surprise me if an arctic air mass presses down before March, at least creating another flurry of fishing activity through cut holes.

Ever since Joe Landolfi and I finally got in touch again, I've hoped that Mike Maxwell will get the chance to ice fish with me and the wunderkind. Maybe. Just not so soon, for sure.

This January seems to shape up as the first time I haven't fished the month in many years. It's possible I'll get out with my son on Sunday, or with Mike on Wednesday, but I am so crammed with stuff to get done, maybe not. Second to my job is family, and if I can do something with Trish on Sunday, this takes precedence over fishing with Matt...when he might not really be so enthused after getting skunked on Round Valley the last three times I've taken him there.

I'm interested in garnering a little evidence. Just a little at that. But lake trout do not always show up in shore catches, or at least some years they have very little. But those two super-cold recent winters when Round Valley Reservoir eventually froze as many as 18 inches thick, they got caught in spades.

Now, assuming a really severe winter does the trick, why is that? I would need equipment and time to measure differences in water temperature, which I assume would be different by slim margins during very severe cold, but this could miss the fact entirely, for all I know. That water is plenty cold right now, but it does take a lot longer before it freezes over than Lake Hopatcong, for example, which might feature ice a foot thick while the reservoir remains open. So variation in water temperature between cold and mild winters is a factor to at least consider, even though we're not regarding differences--I assume-- of many degrees.

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