This is my first post but I love the site -- thanks for all the great info!
I have been fishing Sunapee for the last week and it's been pretty tough. I actually got skunked this morning (7-9am) which is frustrating.
My "home lake" is lake michigan, I fish there a lot for salmon and trout, both from big boats and from a Hobie kayak that is set up for trolling with GPS/fishfinder, etc. I get to Sunapee each august for a few weeks and I love getting a chance to catch fish there.
At Sunapee (August) 07 and 08, I was spotting a lot of LARGE bait balls on the sonar and caught a mixed bag of lakers and salmon, mostly trolling spoons on leadcore from my small boat, mostly on 5-7c leadcore in the deep areas near the loon lighthouse and "hedgehog" - ie east of sunapee harbor. Often with pretty good success.
This year, so far, what I have seen on the sonar is much more scattered isolated suspended fish, and not a lot of bait. I have been scouting around most of the deeper parts of the lake that are north of great island. I will say, one thing really has me stumped. I thought that at this time of year, the thermocline would be at 32-34 feet and the fish would suspend 30-40+. which some do. but there are a lot of marks in 25-30 on the sonar... and I would have thought that is warm water? I put down a probe and it was warm water (72) down to 20 feet. The GLEON buoy is down so I don't really have the depth/temp data I would like.
I do have had a "hot rod" this week, outproducing everything else, a 2.75 inch glow / copper back spoon (white, purple, pink) on 6c leadcore. I also tried a great lakes setup (smoke dodger with "glow" colored spin-and-glow lure) on leadcore and I did get a laker with it.
So far this year, no salmon, and pretty tough fishing overall. I've tried various speeds from 1.5 to 2.5 mph, and various running depths, and various parts of the lake, and lots of different top gun / smelt / etc spoons (I have a couple boxes of AJ's stuff). I am not dialed in to a hot combination yet. I have tried flies but only a little.
I have tried running a shallow flatline with a jointed stickbait to get the smallmouths or whatever the shallow fish are to hit... so far no dice. And this morning I did see a topwater splash 40 feet behind the boat, when I had all lures 300 feet back and 35 down.
So there you go -- part update, part questions... ideas welcome!
If any of the core sunapee crowd would like to talk live, I'm up for that but don't know exactly how, I'm new to the site.
catching most of our fish in 32-35'fow also the past couple weeks (sebago & winnasquam) 2-1 lakers over salmon in sebago all week 2 weeks ago and about 20-1 lakers to salmon on winnasquam. most salmon have been small and the longer ones have been on the thin side. Healthy lakers on both lakes, we fished live bait on winnasquam 2 sundays ago and crushed them. First time live bait for me, it was alot of fun!!!!
On winni the bait balls are slow this year coming off the shallow water.It's been colder and a lot of rain this year.It took a lot longer for the thermocline to set up and this weekend the majority of bait we saw was in 48-50 ft of water,last weekend it was in less than 45 ft of water.The last three weekends fishing has really picked up for us and we were really struggling during june and early july.We are catching the most fish salmon and lakers at 35 ft while piledriving those bait balls.Our best producing setups are white anything db smelts,guide specails and fishlanders.polebreaker
No doubt a tough season on the good lake , salmon have been few and far between .
not sure how much help i can be , but if you want to swap tails of how slow the fishing is come find me at the shop
