Saturday, October 15, 2016

Swauger Lake: June 4th, 2016

Upper Swauger Lake
Since spring is here and the skiing is over its time to hang up the skis and dust off the fly rod. I like Swuager Lake because it's the first lake that you can get to in the spring and it's a great cutthroat fishery. Even though this lake is trophy regulated lake meaning you can only keep two fish over 20 inches, which hasn't been done for a number of years. The forest service has tried extremely hard to change this and turn it back around so that is will produce big fish again like it did in the 90s. The last few years they have stopped stocking cutthroat in the lake because they don't live long enough to reach 20 inches. Instead, they have started stocking California Goldens in hopes that the lake will produce a 20-inch fish. In 2013 they stocked 1,700 goldens and in 2014 2,100. The last time they stocked cutthroat was 2011 and when Shayne, Justin and I went up there I didn't think we would find a single cutthroat, I was wrong. We caught high numbers of cutthroat and didn't see one single golden. The fishing was great and it always seems to be but it will be interesting in the next two years to see if any goldens will show up or if the cutthroat will live a few more years with less fish in the lake system. I will defiantly be back next spring, excited to see what I will find.

Here is a video that I shot of the fish in the lake a few years ago.

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