Memorial Day weekend kayaking - lake trout, kokanee, and whitewater

On Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, a friend and I went fishing in the Dayton Bay area of Big Arm on Flathead Lake.  We downrigger trolled for lake trout between 30 and 85 feet, and each got two lake trout.  Which was about 6 miles per lake trout per person.







During the day we kayaked about a mile and a quarter over to Wild Horse Island, which is owned by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.  A couple of hundred bighorn sheep live on the island, but we didn’t see any from the water.











On Sunday we fished Lake Mary Ronan, a smaller lake about six miles from Flathead Lake.  I quickly caught my limit (10) of Kokanee.



On Monday I went kayaking on the Blackfoot River.  Because the river was high and muddy, the attraction was the rapids, not the fishing.

sweet....

 Hey Pete,
 Looks like a great day on the water. With some fine fishes.

 Question for you ? Why do you carry such a huge ice chest on back of your boat

Those photos make me really homesick! Spent a lot of my younger years in Polson.

Pops lives in Polson...feeling homesick, too...

Question for you ? Why do you carry such a huge ice chest on back of your boat

I carry an ice chest on my kayak to keep the fish I catch cold.  The ice chest contains a bottle of frozen water and a big plastic bag with ice cubes, so I can keep fish cold throughout a long day on the water.  If I didn't carry an ice chest on my kayak, I'd either ruin the fish I caught, or need to keep running back to my vehicle to drop off fish in a cooler there.

If I'm fishing for small fish, like kokanee, I can bring a small cooler.  But when I'm fishing for lake trout or spearfishing for pike, I can reasonably hope to catch fish in the 30"-36" range.  The cooler I'm carrying isn't big enough for fish that big, so I've insulated the area under the front hatch of my Trident and my Revolution, and I keep ice there as well.

What I'd really like is a long, narrow, very well insulated, low-profile, top-loading flexible cooler, which would occupy the full length of the cargo area behind the seat of my kayaks, so I can carry longer fish.  I've urged the Ice Mule cooler guys to develop such a cooler.  Ice Mule and a couple of other manufacturers make end loading fish bags, but I don't like them. I want a top-loading bag.

Great report, thanks for sharing!

Was Lake Mary Ronan very busy?

There were quite a few boats on the lake, but not enough to be intrusive.  Most people were jigging, so I didn't need to worry about crossing paths with other trollers. 

Sweet weekend. I haven't met a lot of guys who do the long grind fishing and then switch to the whitewater stuff in the same weekend - way to take advantage of 3 days to play!