Leadville – The words from Dave Bryant were enough to get any fisherman’s blood boiling.
“Turquoise Lake is on fire,” the Parker resident declared, noting that he and a companion had landed 85 lake trout at the reservoir west of Leadville a few days ago.
Bryant also mentioned that he was bringing his dad, Richard, along on a planned return. Even allowing for the standard angling overstatement, I figured no good son would issue completely misleading information just before Father’s Day.
So, after dodging an earlier windstorm, a Denver visitor greeted Sunday sunrise to discover his temperature gauge proclaimed 27 degrees, a sober reminder that winter hadn’t moved too far away.
The thing about this high country around Leadville is you’re never quite sure which direction winter is traveling. In other years, I’ve experienced 2 feet of snow in early June and a similar deposit in the middle of August.
While this doesn’t allow a lot of wiggle room in between for true summer, it does provide lake trout mavens an extra couple of spins of the wheel. Although prime time has passed at lower-elevation locations such as Blue Mesa – where Don Walker of Florence caught a state record 50.35-pound lake trout May 23 – Turquoise is just coming into phase.
Deep and cold, this 1,650-acre impoundment serves up lake trout nearly all season.
“July is a fabulous month for Turquoise,” Bryant said of a place where elevation approaches 10,000 feet.
For those attuned to proper strategy, catching a lake trout at Turquoise may be the easiest feat in Colorado angling right now. You’ll need a boat or kickboat to position above the 20 to 30 feet of water where most of the action occurs. But the rest is remarkably simple, as Bryant detailed in a recent series of classes at Bass Pro Shops.
For most situations, a white tube jig on a 1/4-ounce head bounced vertically off the bottom works just fine.
When the wind blows, as it did Sunday when tiny whitecaps performed a ballet across the wave crests, bottom bouncers come into play. A brisk wind slides the boat across the surface at optimum speed for bouncer action, turning adversity into an asset.
Bryant’s enthusiasm for fishing rivals that of CEOs for fat severance packages. When he offers a particular tactic, it pays to listen. He favors a bouncer rig by Northland that is relatively snag-free and allows the presentation of a hook baited with sucker meat a couple of feet off the bottom, where most lake trout reside.
Sucker meat trimmed to slender strips is a key element in attracting lake trout of all sizes. Lakers will take raw lures, but catch rate increases exponentially with a bit of protein in the bargain. If there are essentials to lake trout success, they are these: Contact with bottom and sucker meat.
With a chocolate Labrador retriever named Benelli riding shotgun, Aurora resident Lonnie Johnson on Sunday aimed his boat far up into the channel that is the Lake Fork Creek inlet where he found a depth to his liking and a dense population of lake trout.
Most ranged from 16 to 20 inches, with slender bodies that suggest either overpopulation or sparse forage in a relatively sterile environment.
One hookup broke the mold. The trout slammed the bouncer rig hard, then peeled a large reel spool nearly bare. Just when it seemed as if the large laker might come into view, the hook slipped free from a bony jaw.
Few events in life dampen the spirit quite so suddenly as losing a trophy fish; wild elation and raw anticipation evaporate in the split second it takes for the line to go slack.
For a moment, at least, the fire had gone out.
Staff writer Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
