VINDICATION !!!

My first lake trout and a mouth full of sunflower seeds

As many of you are probably sick of reading I have spent a few days this year fishing at Wachusetts Reservoir mostly for lake trout. It has been fruitless. It has been  as frustrating as being stalked by an ex-girlfreind. So what did I do on my day off today? I drove to "the Chu" at six o'clock this morning to give it another try. The definition of insane is ... Me!

Only this time I dragged my buddy Jeff along with me. So we left home at 6 am in 34 degree temperatures to fish for a fish I haven't caught in five tries.To make things even cheerier, there was a 25 mph wind howling out of the southwest. When we pulled into the parking lot at 7:15 there were three cars in the lot. I was devestated. Of the 37 miles of shoreline ( just a guess) I only wanted to fish 25 feet. If someone would have been in those 25 feet, I may as well have slept in. We walked out to the point. There was one guy fishing, but there was room to fish without crowding him. So we set up two poles with shiners. We each  fished a spoon near the bottom with another pole. After three hours it was looking bad. Then we each caught a lake trout! I caught mine on a shiner. Jeff's was caught in such a lucky way, that if it swam up to him and said "I surrender" it wouldn't have been any less suprising. I'm not even going to write about it.

Mass Wildlife feels there are too many lakers in the lake ( yeah right- six trips one trout, they are not swimming in my direction) so they encourage the taking of smaller lakers by not having a size limit, so we kept them.  We brought them home and ate them two ways. We wrapped some chunks in bacon and fried them up. We also baked some fillets in breadcrumbs, garlic powder and pepper. I heard lake trout tasted like crap, but they were delicious.

So finally after all those trips I feel like they were all learning experiences for today- All my time wasted, gas money spent and hikes to the lake are finally vindicated ( justified)!!!