Fishing after the Floods: A Lake Champlain Fishing Report

I’m not sure if my children’s school district is run by Communists or not but given that school starts before Labor Day I have to assume so. This is unfortunate but made the last “summer” trip to Lake Champlain take place a few days ago in late August. We drove up Tuesday night, fished all day Wednesday on our own and then Thursday with Captain Mick Maynard and his first mate Magnus of Lake Champlain Angler. It started pouring Thursday night and I wanted to get Tristan back in time to have a full weekend at home to decompress and do what he wants prior to school, so it was a short trip, but we had fun!

The Lake Conditions

As most are aware, VT had significant flooding a few weeks back and much of that water has made its way into the lake. A good resource is this water level chart maintained for Lake Champlain. The water level was about 97.70 feet which is quite high for August (really, it’s more like spring levels). This is great for me because it allows me to launch my boat at my house (our boat launch is usually unusable by this time of year) but it did present a challenge in that the water is murkier than usual, probably a little cooler than usual, and much higher than usual for this time of year. Finding fish was a challenge.

Wednesday, the 23rd of August

We woke up to an extremely foggy morning. I didn’t want to venture too far because there had been many reports of large debris in the lake due to all the flooding. It had only been a few weeks since this happened and I didn’t want to risk running into something. Thus, we stayed pretty close to the house, mostly messing around the VT shoreline. We didn’t have a whole lot of luck, even throwing nightcrawlers. I managed a small northern just south of the Crown Point bridge on a spinnerbait, but the fishing was hard and we had to work for them.

If you’re not going to catch numbers, you sure hope you’ll catch something of size. We would have taken just about anything, but this MONSTER channel catfish Tristan caught takes the cake. It tipped the scales at 17.36lb and took him several minutes to reel in on 6lb test Seaguar Inviz-X line. How’s that for an endorsement of the product!

Honestly, I’m so proud of this kid. I feel like I (most of us really) could have easily lost this fish. Though I might have been derelict as a parent not getting him into baseball since he was two, I got him into fishing, and it has paid off! I had to joke with him that the only time I can get him to listen is when a fish is on, but he did a good job or responding to my coaching, keeping his rod bent, and letting it take drag when it had to as well as keeping the line out of the trolling motor.

Thursday, August 24: Fishing out of Point Au Roche

On Thursday it was time to meet up with my old friend Captain Mick for another charter. The south winds had picked up badly so we scrapped our initial plan of jigging for lake trout and instead decided to do a bass and pike trip. We launched out of Point Au Roche and headed toward the Gut to see what we could find.

Mickey has acquired a new first mate since I last saw him, a very friendly pooch named Magnus. We appreciated having him sit with us on the ride out to help keep us warm, and it was also great just to have the company.

The fishing was rough, to put it mildly. The water conditions have messed the fish up, but also we weren’t doing Mick any favors with our set up. We took Dad expecting a jigging trip, which works well for him as he isn’t that mobile. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate so we were stuck casting and that meant we had to give him a wide berth up front. It made targeting high percentage water tough, but we stuck it out and got a few good fish, including this nice pickerel by Tristan.

Later That Evening

When we got home, Tristan and I went out and fished some more. Dad stayed behind as he was pretty wiped from the charter. We fished the bay south of the house a bit with frogs and got a few bites, landing a couple of small bass. Then, Tristan had an absolute monster pike SMASH a spinnerbait of his, but unfortunately it cut the line. We both got a great look at it and it was huge, so this is too bad. I think it’s time to start investing in some fluorocarbon leaders just so that doesn’t happen again.

All in all we had a good trip. It was a short. Too short. But with school starting, I brought him back when I did. I’m already looking forward to trying to get out there more in September given the high water and see if my memories back of the flood over a decade ago prove true again.

Thanks for reading,

John Paxton

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