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A few weeks ago we stocked several hundred rainbow trout between 1lb and 2lb into Canada Lake and its very close neighbour Moorhen Pool and in this blog I have some tricks and tips on how to catch and enjoy these hard fighting game fish.
Rainbow trout are a very free swimming predatory species that will feed on all kinds of aquatic insect life as well as small coarse fish such as roach and rudd.
Yes of course you can catch them using your conventional 'coarse' fishing gear and baits. They are especially easy to catch on 'live' baits such as maggots and worms and are fairly easy to take on baits such as bread and sweetcorn especially on float tackle but you may like to take an opportunity for bit of a change in your fishing and target them using spinning gear or even more sporting on fly fishing tackle.
Match angler Jacob Harris with a lovely Canada Lake 'rainbow'
Early in June I had a couple of evening after work sessions on both Canada Lake and Moorhen Pool and have taken some nice trout using the same type of spinning tackle that I use for perch. My 7' Berkley Gorilla Stick matched with a little Shimano fixed spool and 15lb Fireline braid is a really sporting outfit.
My light spinning outfit
For lures its best to use small bladed spinner type lures such as gold or silver Mepps spinners or very small shallow diving plugs. These were followed so many times and I received lots of bumps and hits from the trout before hooking up!
A very effective little gold Mepps
From a pure sporting angle I prefer to 'fly fish' using my standard reservoir trout gear that for me is a 10' rod matched with a large arbour reel and a size 8 weight forward floating line. I'm sure I would have also caught on a sinking line but I prefer to watch a floating line for bites, not that I really needed to as these recently stocked trout hit big-ish flies very hard.
My sporting 'fly fishing' outfit
I did try some very small 'imitative' fly patterns such as buzzers but without much success, I had a lot more action using bigger 'lure' type flies such as stoat and silver and white and black lures retrieved by stripping them back pretty quickly.
A hard fighting Moorhen Pool 'fly caught' rainbow trout
I hope this blog has given you a little insight into fishing for rainbow trout that you may not have caught before and has persuaded you to try to catch them using different tactics.
One final word is on 'fish welfare'. As with all fish please look after them If you are lucky enough to catch one. Rainbow trout are a very hard fighting species and give there all particularly jumping on many occasions, this tends to wear out the fish and they are definitely not as hardy as coarse fish so please - please unhook them carefully and return them ASAP.
Tight lines - Gary