Lake Champlain

Today I embarked on a brutal 13 hour bus ride back up to Plattsburgh that had me arriving just in time to make it to my 5pm lecture. About 30 minutes before arrival, I received an email, informing me that class had been cancelled. Of course I knew what I had to do. I quickly grabbed my fishing gear and waders and headed to a nearby river to target some wild brown trout. The river was extremely high and flowing faster than ever before, which made it difficult to properly retrieve my jerkbait. After spending some time trying some deeper holes, I finally hooked into a gorgeous brown trout! The ripping current made for an incredible fight, even with heavier gear than normal. I’d call this short trip more of a success than my Pennsylvania opening trout weekend, as I only landed a small stocked rainbow and a baby wild brown.

After being skunked on all of my last 8 open water outings, it feels good to finally get on a fish. Not only have I been skunked, I haven’t even gotten a bite in open water since January 17th. But all the effort payed off with this new personal best Northern Pike today! This guy came in at 29.5 inches, an inch longer than my previous personal best, but still shy of my multi-year long goal of catching a 30 inch pike.

Nice pike from today

Today was my most successful day of ice fishing yet! I managed to land two gorgeous lake trout with the biggest coming in at 30 inches long, my new biggest fish through the ice. The day started out very calm at the first spot, but quickly picked up to around 30 mph winds, causing the tent to nearly fly away multiple times. Thankfully I only managed to fall once on the slick ice, however, my entire leg went down the hole when trying to pack up the tent. I’m still trying to figure out what kind of leeches/worms this lake trout coughed up.

Got to hit the ice this morning to target some lake trout and I managed to land two! These were both on the smaller side, but it’s still quite the fight pulling these things up from almost 97 feet of water! The first spot of the day had the clearest ice I’ve ever seen and was well over a foot thick. I could even see the fish fighting from almost 30 feet below the surface!

This morning I got another chance to target some aggressive lake trout through the ice. I tried last Friday and managed to get about 7 bites, but unfortunately, I missed each fish. Today my luck was a little bit better as I finally landed one fish, after missing four others. It was a bit on the slower side since I spent about 10 hours on the ice today, so bites were coming only every 2 hours. This gorgeous lake trout came in at 24 inches long, which makes it the largest fish I have ever caught through the ice. I have a feeling this record won’t last long as there are plenty of bigger lake trout roaming around.

Today I finally got onto my first hard water fish of 2026! I managed to pull up this little laker in 95 feet of water, the deepest I’ve ever fished. This guy ate my baby whale swimbait on a megabass spinhead jig. Hopefully I can get onto some bigger ones in a few days!

The bite was on.