Great Lake

Winter fishing - rug up and enjoy

Logan Reid

It’s the middle of June and the trout fishing season has been closed for a bit over a month now. And you are itching to wet a line again, but what options do you have? Well in last year’s off-season, I decided I wouldn’t stay inside for the winter and decided to see what trouty experiences I could find. I fished Huntsman’s Lake and found a few fish but the real excitement came to me in the form of big healthy hard fighting rainbow trout off the rocks on Great Lake. Great Lake rainbows are in excellent condition and I found myself running along the rocks just to keep up with them before they took me into the backing. These rainbows would hit hard, fight hard and jump all over the place. You can actually target both brown trout and rainbow trout separately on Great Lake, they both like to be in different types of water. I find that the shallower rocky banks will have more brown trout on them and points of bays and deep rocky drop-offs will have more rainbows on them. Explore the edge of Great Lake and you’ll find some of these areas.

Rods And Reels

You’ll need a good fast-action fly rod for fishing for trout at Great Lake in winter to help you punch into the wind that Great Lake tends to get at this time of year. It has many calm days too, but you need the right tools. I’ve been using the Pisces Turbo in both a 5-weight and a 6-weight and both the 9-foot and 10-foot lengths and definitely recommend them. The Pisces Turbo is a budget-friendly rod as it only costs $395 at the time of writing this article.

And for the reel, I use the Orvis Clearwater large arbor cassette reel. I’ve been using this reel for the past couple of seasons and really enjoy using it. The smooth drag this reel has helps me to not break off fish. The cassette function in this reel gives you the flexibility of changing from a floating line to and sinking line quickly and easily.

Lines And Leaders

I’ve been using the Scientific Anglers lines for a couple of seasons now and have been enjoying their use. The two lines I have been using the most on Great Lake are both the floating Infinity line and the Sonar 1/3 sinking line. I’ll change between these two lines throughout the day depending on what the fish are doing. Now for the leader set-up, I like using a 9-foot tapered leader down to 4x which is about six pounds or three kilograms. To this, I’ll add a tippet ring and about another six feet of 4x tippet (about 1.8 metres) which brings my total leader and tippet length to 15 feet (or about 4.5 meters long). I’ll also add a dropper tag to my tippet ring so that I can run two flies on this rig.

Tactics for Great Lake trout

Great Lake fish don’t seem to be too picky when it comes to fly choice and are often quite opportunistic and will take pretty much anything you throw at them so all you will need are a few flies you have confidence in and you are right to go. Just the same as you would be doing in the season you need to watch the water and try to work out what the fish might be feeding on. Even in winter if you get a nice still warmer day midge hatches can still occur so keep an eye out for that! If you can’t notice anything on the top it might be time to take a look subsurface. Can you notice things such as stick caddis? Or see a few galaxias darting in between the rocks? Well, it might be time to chuck a couple of wet flies on.

Some of my favourite flies for wet fly fishing on Great Lake are the orange bead green Magoo, the Shrek and the black and gold humongous. Other flies I’ve had success on are the gold sparkler, red and black matuka and a sunset fly.

When using a couple of wet flies I tend to start my casts really short and only have about a rod length of fly line out the end of my rod. And to retrieve this line through the water and give my flies movement I just lift my rod tip as you would do at the end of a cast usually and hang them there giving my rod tip a jiggle every now and then to give them some movement. I’ll also fan these casts out. After I have worked over all the water in front of me then I’ll then strip some more line off my reel to add an extra bit of line so I can cover the water a little bit further out. Again fanning my casts out and covering all the water in front of me. I’ll repeat this process until I have covered all available water in front of me before moving further up the bank and repeating this process. I’ll change up my retrieve until I find what the fish are after. Some of the retrieves I’ll use throughout the day will be a figure of eight retrieve, a standard pulling retrieve and a jab jab jab pause retrieve. But I find often that any of these retrieves aren’t as important as the pause is. I’ll often find that I’ll get takes when the fly has stopped moving. I believe this is because the fish has seen a moving item and started chasing it and when it stops moving the fish’s predatory instincts kick in a pounce on your fly before it gets away.

Dry Fly Choice

I have also found that even in winter these opportunistic Great Lake browns and rainbow trout will still take dries and I find that the best dries are your biggest and ugliest dries, things like the Chernobyl ant patterns and bruisers bugs work well. I also like big palmered highland duns in either a dark brown colour or black. On a bright and sunny winter’s day, you can polaroid fish by walking along the rocks and scanning the water. This is a really exciting way to fish Great Lake and I find it very rewarding. Finding a fish cruising the edge and then presenting your dry to it is always enjoyable. But, you won’t always be able to polaroid during the winter so another good option is to prospect with your dries. By thoroughly working the first four or five metres of water from the bank opportunities will come your way. All you will need to do is fan your casts out over the water and only leave them there for somewhere between five and ten seconds before giving the flies a little bit of movement

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Trip Preparation

Tassie is already an unpredictable place weather wise and adding Great Lakes elevation of 1034 meters above sea level at full supply it becomes even more random. Then add to that it being winter you will need to be properly prepared for any weather conditions that may arise. Make sure you have an accurate weather forecast for the day you’re planning to head out. I use the Bureau of Meteorology ( the BOM for short) other good apps are Willy Weather and Windy. You’ll also need appropriate clothing. Winter on Great Lake can get very cold. I like to wear a layering system in these cooler months. I’ll start with a base layer being a long sleeve thermal layer both on top and on the bottom. Make sure you have warm socks too. A good pair of Merino wool socks are a good option. The next layer is your mid-layer. This is where I like to wear some trackies on the bottom and a puffer jacket on the top. The last layer is the outer shell to protect you from wind and rain. This is when I’ll hop into my waders and throw a rain jacket on over the top. Now you’re ready to head up the mountain. Make sure you know the rules and regulations on Great Lake this time of year as not the whole lake is open all year. Canal Bay is closed to protect the spawning fish that will be swimming up the Liawenee Canal. And all the creeks and rivers that flow into Great Lake are off-limits and also a 50-metre radius below where they run into the lake is also closed for the same reason. On a side note make sure you drive to the conditions. The roads can be icy at this time of year.

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