Most of the brookies I catch this morning are of this modest size.
Silver Lake is a 12-acre body of water located right next to the ocean in Phippsburg, Sagadahoc County, Maine (see The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer map 6 E5). If you are quiet and listen attentively when on the ice, you can hear the waves crashing on the nearby beach! To reach this location, drive on Route 209 from Bath and pass Popham Beach State Park. The pond will appear within less than a mile from the entrance of the park. Just before reaching the southern tip of the pond, turn right on Hunnewell Avenue, which is a gravel road that splits off from Route 209. Drive 200-300 ft. on this road and leave your vehicle on the side. The access point will be to your left. Keep in mind that parking space is limited to a handful of vehicles (note: no parking is available or allowed on Route 209) and may also be a problem after a snowstorm.
This little guy would fit nicely in the frying pan!
Silver Lake is one of my favorite “go-to” early-winter brook trout ice fishing destination in southern Maine. I have fished it through the ice on several occasions before (click here, here, and here for examples). Unlike more accessible – and therefore popular! – locations (click here, here, and here for examples), this pond is literally at the end of a dead-end road on a peninsula. Hence, it is only lightly fished, and you are likely to have the place all to yourself. The traffic on Route 209, which runs parallel to the western shoreline, is light and unobtrusive. The other reason I enjoy ice fishing here is that the pond is stocked with lots of fish each fall in preparation for the hard-water season. In early December of last year, the state stuffed it with 600 9-inch brookies, 50 13-inch brookies, and 10 20-inch brookies, for a total of 55 fish per acre. While I do not care for the little guys and am secretly hoping to encounter one of the lunker fish, this kind of stocking density essentially ensures fast action. Ice fishing on this pond occurs under the general fishing laws applicable to the south region. The pond has a maximum and mean depth of 7 ft. and 5 ft., respectively, and is therefore quite shallow. Click here for a depth map and more fisheries information.
The trout are mangling the bait fish but refuse to get hooked…
I arrive at Silver Lake by 7:15 am. The air temperature is a pleasant 35° F and the sky is overcast, and scheduled to remain so for the rest of the morning. Perfect! But I am ambivalent about the ice because this pond is right by the ocean, the temperature has been above freezing for the last 48 hours, and it rained the day before. I use my trusted spud to carefully check the situation at the entry point. I see an underwhelming 5 inches of ice, with the top inch soft and slushy, but the conditions appear safe. I put on my cleats and place retractable ice safety picks around my neck before venturing further out on the ice, just in case. I will fish along the southern shoreline in water 3 to 6 ft. deep. I use my auger to drill four widely-spaced holes and start deploying my traps with small shiners placed halfway down the water column. I make it a point to first place a salmon egg on the hook to provide extra visual and olfactory stimulants of interest to the predators below. I do not get a flag by the time the fourth trap is deployed, which is disappointing. The flag on the next-to-last trap finally goes up as I am drilling a dozen jigging holes. None too soon! The spool is not turning, and the baitfish is gone. I send down a jig but find no takers. I get another three flags over the next half hour in that one trap and the one furthest out. The signal is clear: I pick up the first two traps which have not done a thing this morning and move them closer to where the action is. This flexibility is an important part of my repertoire: I move traps that do not “work” closer to those that do. Stocked brook trout tend to congregate and the active traps are telling you where they are foraging. But I notice a definite pattern: my bait is getting mangled or stolen but the trout are avoiding the hook. They are also not consistently falling for the jigging lure I send down after I get an unproductive flag. It is clear to me that the trout are skittish around the baitfish and uncommitted this morning. I will need to work to catch them!
The Power Nymph once again came through for me.
I have had 7 flags by 9 am but have only a 9-inch and a 13-inch brookie to show for all my efforts. And then the flag action dies down, as it typically does around this time of the morning when ice fishing. That gives me the breathing space required to focus full-time on jigging. I use my two preferred lures: a Power Nymph teamed up with a small jig head hook and a tiny 1.5-inch Rapala jigging rap. I swap two jigging rods as I go from hole to hole and definitely notice more action on the Power Nymph, which becomes the winning lure this morning. I enhance the attractiveness of the Nymph by squirting a bit of crayfish juice on the plastic lure each time I go to a different hole. The next hour and a half yields only one more flag – and no fish on the ice – but six trout on the Nymph. Boy, I once again proved to myself that jigging easily makes the difference between slow fishing and much better fishing! It is now 11 am and time to break up camp and head back home. Only two of the eight trout I landed this morning measured 13 inches and I got nowhere near the lunkers. Nonetheless, I caught fish and enjoyed my time on the ice. Life is good indeed!
The results: I landed 8 brook trout (largest was 13″) in 3.5 hours of ice fishing.
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