Moosehead Lake fishing report

This week, I’d like to talk about the lake trout fishery on Moosehead Lake. We spend quite a bit of our time working on Maine’s largest lake. There are just three full-time fisheries biologists in the Greenville office and our region reaches from Dover-Foxcroft to Allagash Lake and from Rainbow Lake to Skinner. There are about a quarter million acres of standing water and over 4,000 miles of flowing water in our region and they are all important, but Moosehead Lake commands a lot of attention.

Lake trout are native to Moosehead Lake and are an important component of the summer and winter recreational fishing. These large predators are heavily reliant on smelt for forage so their abundance will impact the other species in the lake that also feed on smelt, especially landlocked salmon and to a lesser extent, brook trout. Lake trout have really been driving the bus for the last 30 years from a fisheries management perspective. Sometimes it gives me flashbacks to the movie “Speed” with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. It’s been quite a ride.

Catch rates are generally a reflection of population abundance. In general, we would like to see the catch rates to be nearly the same. The population of small lake trout just exploded in the early 1990s. We responded by liberalizing size and bag limits but we were never able to really get ahead of the situation.

With all those small lake trout in the fishery in the early 1990s, one might think there would be some great fishing for bigger lake trout in a few years, but it never happened. The catch rate for lake trout over 18 inches has been fairly stable over the entire time. That’s because all those small hungry lake trout devastated the smelt population resulting in very poor growth for both lake trout and smelt-dependent salmon. We routinely take stomachs from the fish we see in the winter and count/measure the smelts in each. These data show the same trends.

From 2005-07, we saw catch rates for small lake trout starting to climb and decided we needed to try something new to finally turn this bus around. We implemented a no size or bag limit on lake trout under 18 inches in 2008. We also helped organize the ice fishing derby in January to bring more anglers to the lake. We monitor the changes in this fishery very closely. Our studies allow us to generate an estimate of angler use and harvest each year. We estimate that around 78,000 smaller lake trout were harvested by anglers for 2008-10 while these very liberal regulations were in place. Anglers were very effective at helping to thin the lake trout population and returning it to a more favorable level.

We have tightened the size and bag limits on lake trout since 2010 to maintain the current population densities. We are right where we need to be for good growth and good catch rates. Currently, the salmon and lake trout are the fattest we have seen in over 30 years on Moosehead Lake. It should be a great spring!

Contributed photo
BIG FISH, SMALL ANGLER — Ryan McLellan of Monson poses with a 10 pound, 10 ounce catch pulled from Moosehead Lake this past winter.