A friend from work really wanted to go trout fishing – even though it is the middle of pink salmon season. I didn’t mind too much, since I really enjoy those little trout lakes. I wanted to make sure that he was going to catch fish, so I took him to Lake Margaret.
Lake Margaret is a little lake northwest of the city of Duvall. Its higher elevation and deeper waters help it fish well into the late summer. It is stocked with catchable size rainbow and cutthroat smolt.
The water at the lake was the lowest I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t any problem getting the boat launched.
We started around sunrise and could see fish rising in the middle of the lake, so of course that is where we started fishing.
We were trolling an olive willy and black leach flies – both setup with the simple trolling rig. We added enough splitshot to get down in the 10-15 foot range, and just went back and forth in the area where the fish were rising.
We had pretty constant action, with pretty much a 50/50 split between cutthroat and rainbow trout being landed. In the 2.5 hours we had lines in the water we landed about 20 trout, as well as a number of strikes which didn’t hook up.