What a trip! Stayed at a work friend's cabin on this medium sized lake & was very impressed with the water quality this late into the Summer - warm, clean, barely any algae. Too bad it was so windy & cloudy, but a good weekend none the less. They had a nice boat from the 70's that fit 5 of us, so we had a boat load armed with an arsenal of bait - 6" herrings, 5" stink smelt, 2" minnows, some night crawlers & ofcourse the standard trolling rigs. We were on the hunt for monster pike (used to have HUGE ones back in the 80's) or even better big burbot I heard that lurk on the sandy bottom of this lake...
Saturday morning out around 9 am before breakfast & trolled it around the bay & mouth of the bay. Spoons seemed to do the trick right at the mouth with a pair of 2 footers landed by the group & 3 lost... After breakie we hit a little cove with a huge drop-off right off shore. Started a healthy with the anchor down (maybe too fast, cause we had to continually turn the boat around & start all over again). This is where we tried our assortment of baits. Less than 10 minutes in my friend's drag went out of control & his rod nearly snapped as something grabed his smelt & just swam off on it's merry way. Whatever it was we never found out cause his braided line (yes the 30 lb braided stuff!) snapped soon after. It was a monster. We just didn't get it anywhere close to the boat. We are under the assumtion it was a ling cod cause it did not fight like a pike - it just dove & swam steadily away like nothing was happening... After that we had a lot of action with the big baits, landed another 7 pike (all mid-sized) & lost countless others on the jig... Eventually got bored & tried deep into the bay with various gear landing a few more smaller pike...
After an early dinner 2 of us took my friend's kids out to the little cove drop-off & taught them all about jigging the big bait after they crapped out on spoons. Luckily one of the 2 kids was adapt & patient enough to get a 3 footer in the boat...
So Hanmore was awesome for mid-sized pike - lots, frisky & tasted great. I'm sure there are big ones in there too. You'd definately need a boat to do any damage here. I'm going to hit this lake again in the winter & see what I can do for burbot & see if I can catch that monster my friend lost.
