Winter Lake Trout?

[MuskieBait]

Personally, I usually find lake trout deeper...40 feet is as shallow as I've ever found them, but 70 feet is where I aim for most of the time. The lakes I fish are usually over 100 feet in the deeper areas. When I find them at 40 feet of water, it is usually a flat or shoal where it is connected to deep water with a nice slope.

I find most of my lake trout on a slope most of the time...whether it is a slope connected to a point, bar, shoal, hump or drop offs. I find that fish will ofter work a certain depth (or contour on that slope) for a good part of the day. This slope is not necessarily a drop off. There are contour areas I fish that will drop from 40 feet to 120 feet with evenly spaced contour lines.

Not all slope need to be steep. Personally, I prefer slopes that are not too steep for two reasons.

1) A steep drop off will have very narrow contour areas. It's easy to miss a certain target depth if you just have a GPS to depend on (which is good to about 10 feet of accuracy). With a manual auger, it means you'll be doing a lot of drilling to find the right depth. A more wider slope will be a bit more forgiving.

2) With a steep drop off, fish may be concentrated on a narrow zone. Even if you are 15 feet apart, the guy that is getting fish every drop may be on the right contour vs. the guy not even getting a fish to look at a bait if he's just a bit off. I've had that happen many times, especially fishing for whitefish on Lake Simcoe. It's frustrating.

The contour that the fish may use day to day could change and, like Eli said, it is based on forage. It is really the forage that moves around and the lake trout that follows.

Strangely, I often find big school of bait on Lake Simcoe where the bait school turns my sonar black from bottom to about 30 feet off bottom. Some of these schools may take 30 minutes to go through. Yet...so predators around the school or following the school. Weird. When you are fishing deep a sonar is really the only way you can find the bait school.

Bottom composition often comes into play too. Any time you have some kind of transition between mud, clay, gravel, or sand, those are good places to check. Interestingly, I don't find too many lake trout on hard bottom (rock or bedrock). I usually find them over softer bottom such as mud, clay or sand with gravel/boulder nearby.

Winter lake trout is really not that hard...find a lake with them, narrow down an area with a nice contour to work, decided on a target depth, and start fishing. Some days, you may make a couple of moves (shallower or deeper) to find them. Some days you may need to auger a lot of holes to locate the right area.

Once you start icefishing and auger a few holes with a manual auger, you'll soon realize that it is to much work for run-and-gun fishing with a manual auger. If you add a pop-up shelter to the equation, you may not even want to move after setting up. For the longest time I fished without a shelter and it allows me to move around a bit with ease...but it does get cold on those -15C with 20km/h days. Nowadays, I choose a bit of comfort over honing in on fish.

This past weekend would be way to cold (for me) for any run-and-gun fishing unless you have a power auger, a flip style hut and a form of motorized transportation (snowmobile, ATV or Argo). Wind was terrible and the slushy, slippery surface was not fun. Those are the days you just want to sit in a warm hut and hang out.