My trip started well when I hooked a four-pound mackinaw in the pre-dawn gloaming, moments after letting out line for the first troll of the morning. As often happens on sunny, calm days on Tahoe though, once sunlight hit the water the fish were tough to come by. I hooked one more small mack on a fast trolled plug, then by mid-morning switched to the old standby for putting numbers in the boat- ‘metal-n-meat’. Slowing my little boat down to one mile-per-hour by lowering the trolling plate, I let out a set of silver flashers trailing a nightcrawler on my outside rod, and a small dodger ahead of a live minnow on the rod running closer to shore.

Even this strategy, normally deadly at least for average-size rainbows, browns and mackinaw, failed to ignite a hot fishing trip. I picked up a fifteen-inch rainbow for three hours of effort, and I know what you’re thinking:

“Two lake trout to four pounds and a nice rainbow? Sounds like a good fishing trip to me!” Well, it is in most places, but after a dozen years and thousands of hours fishing this huge, world-class trout lake, I was looking for something more. To this end I finally reeled in the live bait, raised my trolling plate, and resumed pulling artificial lures as I worked my way back to El Dorado boat ramp in South Lake Tahoe.

At one in the afternoon, in full sun with just a slight ripple on the water, I was not really expecting a bite, much less a big fish, but there have been too many monsters caught here in such conditions to just give up without at least attempting some precision trolling in key areas on the way home.

In one such spot where I have caught many trout over the years, I was just drifting off into a daydream of big fish when one slammed my inside rod and quickly stripped at least fifty yards of line off my trolling reel against the lightly-set drag.

This is the critical moment in which many of the largest trout are lost. When trolling shallow water with the largest lures in low-light conditions, trollers on Tahoe can get away with ten to twelve-pound line, but in the sunny, calm conditions at hand I was down to super-thin six-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon leader. To reduce the pressure on such light line I immediately turned out into deeper water and started a long, slow circle back to the fish. This is a shallow-trolling technique I learned from an accomplished trophy trout hunter and guide, Gene St. Denis of Blue Ribbon Charters. It won’t work in every lake, but in Tahoe, almost every shallow rocky or snag filled spot is near deep water with a largely sandy bottom, and if you can sneak around and work back toward your fish while at the same time working it into deep water, you’ll have a much easier time getting in a big fish than if you just keep moving at trolling speed or even put the boat into neutral, hoping the trout and your boat stay off the rocks, docks and submerged trees.

So I exploited the sneak-around technique, until I brought a fish hooked on 500 feet of line in just twenty-five feet of water out over the hundred-foot zone with just 87 feet out on my line counter reel. If the mathematics in this paragraph confuse you, you’re not ready for this type of trout-trolling. After the initial powerful run, I couldn’t really tell how big my fish was until I finished ‘the big circle’, finally got my line truly tight, and gave an exploratory yank.

So much for subtle techniques. My reel’s line counter window was a slot-machine blur for several seconds before slowing down to read, coincidentally, 387 feet. This fish was nothing if not precise, having stolen exactly one hundred yards of line in its bid for freedom. At this point my main concern was that the line appeared to be aiming straight down into the water from the tip of the bent, pulsing rod, but my fishfinder showed the bottom at only 104 feet. That left 283 feet of line unaccounted for, and a big, angry fish somewhere on the bottom towing all that loose line around, just looking for an obstruction to loop it around and break me off. Yes, more math equations. Your ability to crunch the numbers is not essential to catching large trout, but it sure helps.

It took half an hour to gain back the majority of my line, which is quite a long time for the average religious slacker to maintain a prayer: “Jesus, please don’t let my line break; please let me just see the fish, please let me get it in the net.” Don’t accuse me of taking the lord’s name in vain here- I meant every word. When I finally scooped it into my extra-large, long-handled net I was actually disappointed for a moment to find that I had caught a 20 pound, 38.5 inch mackinaw.

Of course this was quite a catch, one of my largest lake trout, but on Tahoe the most elusive trophies are the rainbows and brown trout. And the depth and area of the lake where I hooked this fish, combined with the way it fought, from the initial hit through each streaking run, had me fantasizing that I had finally hooked the mother hen of all brown trout.

Yes friends, once you’ve caught enough representatives of each species here, you can usually differentiate between them. While all the little guys display similar behavior (frantic, rapid pulls on the rod tip interspersed with periods of limp compliance as you reel them in), Tahoe trophy trout usually exhibit one of three fighting techniques:

Mackinaw: Your rod bends over hard and stays that way without so much as a twitch. You’ve hooked bottom. No, your drag is not letting line out at the same pace at which the boat is moving forward- you must have snagged a large, submerged branch that you are now towing behind the boat. Wait! The branch is kicking, pumping, swimming away from you at a rapid pace! Big laker on!

Rainbows: Your lure is trolling 15 feet deep but before you even see the rod bend or hear your drag clicking, there’s that lure, three feet in the air in the mouth of a pissed-off Sierra steelhead. If you set the drag too loose you’ll fail to get a good hookset and your hook will fly free during these aerobatic maneuvers, and if you set it just a notch too tight any one of the trout’s numerous high-speed runs could snap you off.

Brown Trout: Oh, those tricky bastards! You get a hit- maybe heavy, maybe light, then you feel nothing, because the damn fish is running straight at you! So you stop reeling and then fulfill your own prophecy as the trout you thought was no longer there throws the hook on slack line. If you’re not completely fooled you may feel a slight resistance, ‘maybe a little rainbow or a stick or something’, which you will reel in rapidly without adjusting your drag until you see a huge fish just beneath the surface, slowly finning right next to the boat. Call me crazy, but a big brown trout will actually lock eyes with the angler at this point, give a dirty look, then turn and zip off into the depths, taking the first, fresh run with only ten feet of line out from the rod tip. Snap!

Although there are quite a few lakes in my corner of Northern California where savvy anglers can reasonably expect to catch a trophy trout, with winter bearing down most spots near me are either growing a skim of ice or becoming inaccesible due to snowed-over roads. So I’m stuck here, driving only a couple of miles from my house to launch my boat on one of the best spots of all. Though my last few trips have only resulted in catches of rainbow trout to three pounds and mackinaw from five to eight pounds, this has been one hell of a fall. I caught my monster mackinaw in November, and in October I caught a couple of five-pound brown trout and a six-pound rainbow. Most of these fish came on my current favorite lure, a six-inch AC Skinny Plug.

This handmade, minnow-imitation featuring a jointed body and a soft plastic tail has been catching me most of my largest Tahoe trout recently, but Rapalas, Rebels, and Bombers are also excellent choices for long-line, shallow water trolling. In this lake’s crystal-clear water, realistic color patterns are usually more productive in the shallows than exaggerated, attractor colors- silver, gold and rainbow trout lures are always top choices.

You may also notice that on Lake Tahoe we don’t talk much about using spoons, flies or spinners such as Panther Martins or Rooster Tails that are popular on many trout waters. Don’t let me stop you from proving the locals wrong, but here we rely largely on only certain lures and on two very different trolling speeds, FAST and SLOW:

Fast Trolling: We’re talking two-miles-per-hour or better here. Rapalas, Rebels, AC Plugs, Bombers, Storms, J-Plugs and Lyman Lures all produce well in this speed-range. The J-Plugs, Lymans and AC Originals have a ‘cut plug face’ that causes them to wiggle for a few seconds then dart hard to the left or right before returning to center. Trout frequently follow a lure for some distance before striking, and this darting action can trigger the fish to make a sudden dash for the prey it believes is escaping.

Although my favorite fast-trolling speed is a range from two to three-and-a-half miles-per-hour, some trophy trout hunters trigger bites with speeds of four, five or even six to seven MPH at times. The higher the speed, the more important proper plug choice becomes. Rebels, Bombers and most models of the AC Plug troll effectively at two to three MPH, with line-tangling rolling sometimes occuring at higher speeds. Large Rapalas, properly tuned, will run true and dive deep at ocean speeds, up to eight or ten MPH. Do we need to run that fast for trout? In general, no. You may well need to throttle up pretty hard to counter a strong side-wind or avoid a fast-approaching boat though, and it’s a great confidence builder to know that although you just pulled an unexpected high-speed maneuver, your lures are still back there, working their magic correctly.

Slow Trolling: For me, this category is a bit simpler, broken down into two basic lure categories. The speeds for this technique vary from less than .5 MPH to 1.5 MPH, but I find the hottest speeds in most situations are usually in the .8 to 1.2 MPH range.

The slow-speed plugs I favor are Kwikfish and Flatfish- they wiggle furiously at a pace that would barely cause most minnow plugs to exhibit even a slight side-to-side shimmy. For a detailed description of these lures, browse my previous article for this website, ‘Bananas For Trout’.

The other, and even more popular slow-troll method on Tahoe is to pull live-bait behind attractor blades, either dodgers or flashers. A short leader of light fishing line is tied to the rear end of the flasher or dodger, and a live minnow or nightcrawler is threaded on either a single or treble hook at the terminal end of the leader.

For more information on trolling with dodgers on Lake Tahoe, check out my article ‘The Artful Dodger’.

And for the technique variation that involves using strings of spinner blades known locally as flashers, read another of my past articles, ‘Flashers- How To’.

I hope you’re now fired up both about the many techniques we use to trick trout here on Lake Tahoe and about how much hard work it takes to get even two-to-three pound fish to bite consistently. As for the true monsters, the trout and mackinaw in the five to twenty-pound class, let me defer here to two of the best guys in the business, Charter Captains Mike Nielsen of Tahoe Topliners and Gene St. Denis of Blue Ribbon Charters. Here are two killer photos depicting what can happen when those in-the-know fish the shallows on Lake Tahoe.

Last February, on a sunny, glass-calm day, Gene couldn’t pick up any fish on a topline troll, so he used his downriggers to explore the 40 to 60 foot zone and caught a ten-pound brown trout then a sixteen-pound mackinaw in less than an hour using rainbow trout pattern Rapalas. In early April, Mike had clients aboard his boat for a shallow-water trolling run in choppy-cloudy conditions, and one lucky client landed a fourteen-pound hen brown trout, one of the largest browns ever caught on Tahoe. Mike is pretty secretive about his lure choices, but I know he favors Rapalas, Rebels and Bombers, and never shies away from trying the latest models and color patterns. Both guides apply attractant scent to their lures- Mike prefers Pautzke’s products while Gene and I use Pro-Cure products. The new Pro-Cure Super Gels in the Trophy Trout, Herring and Crawfish scents have been dynamite for me recently. Enjoy the photos, Happy Holidays, and try to remember- while fishing this lake is never easy, the best trout of your season or even your life is never that far away.

Until Next Time!
Mark (Never Stand In A Canoe) Wiza
Email Me!

Mark is a licensed fishing guide offering a small number of educational trout fishing trips in the Tahoe area. From spring though fall, trips include fly fishing, spin fishing and trolling on local rivers and lakes. At this time the hot trip is Mark’s On-The-Water Seminar for anglers on their own boats on Lake Tahoe. Email Mark at wiza@fishsniffer.com or call (530) 545-1475 for details.