Guides to BC lake fishing

Written for anglers planning a day on a British Columbia lake: how the water changes through the year, where the trout go and why, the fish you may catch, and how the forecast on every lake is built. Where a guide carries numbers, they are counted from the 1,842 lakes in the atlas when the page is built, not typed in.

• How the fishing score works
  How the 1 to 100 score on every BC lake is built: wind on that water, rain, air temperature, the barometer's direction, cloud and the moon.
• Depth, and where the trout are
  What a trout does with a deep lake through the season, and where the depth on each lake's sheet comes from.
• A year on a BC trout lake, season by season
  Ice-off, turnover, the chironomid weeks, summer heat, fall and freeze-up: what a BC stillwater does each season, and why elevation moves the calendar.
• Fishing chironomids on BC lakes
  The midge that feeds BC trout: its life cycle, when it hatches, where to anchor, and how to fish a pupa under an indicator or on a long leader.
• How to read a BC lake depth chart
  Contours, shoals, drop-offs and humps: how to read the Province's lake depth charts, what they cannot show, and which lakes have one.
• The trout and char of BC lakes
  Rainbow, cutthroat, brook trout, lake trout, kokanee, bull trout, Dolly Varden and burbot: telling them apart, and where each turns up in BC.
• Camping at BC recreation site lakes
  How BC's forest recreation sites work for anglers: campsites and day use, forest service roads, fees, fire bans, and which lakes have a site.
• Winterkill: why some BC lakes lose their trout
  How a lake runs out of oxygen under the ice, which lakes are most exposed, what aerators do, and how to tell after ice-off.