Giant Pickerel Everywhere.

I just returned from a week long fishing trip in the Annis River System in Yarmouth Nova Scotia. I was camping on the shores of Ellenwood Lake, but had a chance to travel a little from my camp to fish a few lakes in the system. Weather through the week covered the entire spectrum from cool cloudy days, torrential downpours, thunderstorms, and finally a couple sunny hot days to end the week. Going into the week I was led to believe that the fishing for pickerel was world class, and that was pure truth. The Annis system is heavily tannin stained water, with minimal defined weed lines in Ellenwood Lake, and large lilly pad beds as you move down through the system. I spent a good bit of time trolling the shoreline in Ellenwood trying to establish the lake definition. I caught a few fish while trolling, and established a bit of a pattern. Along the shores were countless underwater points, with very little shoreline indications for where these points existed. I found that casting from the end of these points into 8 to 12 feet of water was catching most of my pickerel and bass. A variety of baits were effective, with most fish coming on a Mepp's Musky Killer Black bucktail, #5 Blue Fox Vibrax in blue/silver, and a Rapala DT Thug in Firetiger. One morning I came across a sloping shoreline between two points where the wind was pushing over a shoreline point, causing an eddy of current into this area that went from shallow rock to a 12 foot deep mud bottom area. I marked fish here, and caught some decent white perch on a drop shot. I returned to this spot the following day, only this time it was my personal best Chain Pickerel that picked up a 3 Berkley Power Minnow on a drop shot, a feat I was able to repeat later with another big pickerel. I was marking a lot of fish in this area without a lot of action, until I switched to a Kamooki Smartfish in Natural Shad colour. The fish were being marked in 12 to 13 feet of water, so I let the Smartfish drop to the bottom then just barely crawled it over the bottom to stay in that 12 foot depth. The Smartfish has a really consistent slow speed wobble more like a blade bait than a lipless crankbait. It helped me pull in a lot of fish although none of which could match the size of the pickerel I had caught on the dropshot. As the weather warmed and sun came out over the last couple days of my stay I found it more difficult to locate the fish, with no more of the big pickerel showing up. At the conclusion of my week I'd beat my personal best pickerel 6 times, and matched my personal best smallie with a 19 fish taken in a river channel on my last day of fishing. With countless 18 smallies through the week as well. Despite the unpredictable weather, it was a trip that I will have to repeat in the future, hopefully earlier or later in the season when some of those fat smallies and pickerel are a little more active through the day, and a little more consistent through the week.