In this blog i am going to tell a story of a great day of fishing i had at island lake near Hyland Valley Copper mine.
As usual i spent the better part of 2 weeks doing reserch about the lake i wanted to go to for a 4 day weekend in the second weekend of July 2 years ago. I seem to have a bad habit of looking through the map books and changing my mind at least a dozen times before i choose a lake (ask my wife it drives her nuts). This time was no different, i hoed and hummed and i finally choose to go to Island lake, i had heard so much about this lake from other fishermen that i needed to give it a try.
We packed up all of our things and headed out for what i hoped would be a fun weekend. The drive to the lake was uneventful until we reached the turn off to the lake from the main road. Once I turned off the main road I saw there was a steep incline to go down, not a big deal for my truck, the problem was I was towing a tent trailer. I had little choice but to go down since I was already half way down and it would have been very hard to try and back up the hill around a corner. I headed down the hill slowly to try to not damage my trailer to bad, well that didn’t happen i ended up tearing off the stabilizing legs off the bottom of the trailer. I headed to the best camp site i could find and it was a bute. This site was on the edge of the bay on a spit that juts out onto the lake and was a large site. We set up camp and had a hour or so until dark so I decided to go down to the water and check out the insects that are in the lake soi would have some idea of what I should start with in the morning. What I saw was unreal, the bugs in this lake are massive, i saw a few Dragons that were 3 inches long and shrimp that were almost as big. I was naturally very excited for the next day and had one hell of a time getting any sleep that night. The next morning i got up and got ready, I felt like a school kid on halloween i was that giddy. I prepared 2 rods, one with a medium sink with a Dragon and one with a full float with a Tom Thumb. I got into my float tube and kicked out slowly trolling both rods and looking for the weed bed that runs from one end to the other of this lake. I didn’t have to wait long to find the weed bed, it was right were it showed on the topographical map.
I trolled down one side of the weed bed and found a spot where the weeds thin and kind of form a bay in the weeds. I parked and dropped anchor and started casting my Dragon toward the weeds, after my second cast i was into a nice fish. This fish ended up taking a few runs and gave me one hell of a fight (so i thought). I continued casting my dragon and picked up a few more nice fish in the 3-5 pound range. I fished for about a total of 6 hours the first day and picked up about 6-8 fish.
The next day i decided to try Chironomid fishing at the far south end where the lake takes a deep sharp drop tp around 35 feet deep. First cast with my black Chironomid with red ribbing and a white snow cone produced a fish, I thought that this was the start of another great day. WRONG the next 5 or so hours produced nada and i went back to camp. As i was sitting on shore reading my copy of the Gilly i noticed some fish were starting to rise and feed on the surface. I took a close look and saw they were targeting sedges (My favorite dry fly) Well off i was. I put on a #12 sedge and hit the water, second cast in and i had a fish on, the first of 10 or so fish. What a graet day.
The next day i went out in the late morning and picked up a few nice fish but nothing to great. That evening i figured i would go out just before dark a try my luck with sedges again. I love fishing sedges at night, and this night was perfect for it, lots of light from the moon. I had seen some very large sedges comming off so i decided to tie on a #8 sedge (the biggest i have ) and started to cast. The fly barely hit the water and bang a massive hit. This fish took multiple runs and took to the air more than a dozen times. What a fight, i was using a 5-6 weight rod and found that it was to small for these big fish. I changed my rod to my 8 weight and started again, first cast bang fish on huge fight etc… This went on for 3 or 4 hours until way past dark, and i was in heaven. The smallest fish of the night was around 4 pounds with the grandaddy of the evening going well into the doublr digits ( around 14 pounds) Like i said what a weekend , i have gone back to island lake a few times since and had good fishing, but nothing even close to this weekend. Give this lake a try it will shock you at the size of these fish.
Until next time
Wishing everyone tight lines and tons of fish.
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