Those rod-snatching bulldogging lake trout are among the easiest fish to catch through the ice. If that’s not the way you find them, you’re doing something wrong. You’re not fishing in the right places or using the right presentations.

To get on the right track and to stay there, remember that lake trout are the cheetahs of freshwater—prowling predators that rarely remain idle in one or two spots. Instead, they glide through the crystal clear water column in small to medium size hunting parties, constantly on the move, scanning a wide periphery in front of them as they track schools of silvery ciscoes, whitefish, smelt, shiners, and perch. When you find baitfish, you find trout.

Buffalo Jumps

Fortunately, lakers also are structure oriented. It’s not that these open-water gypsies need hidden outcrops to hide or live around. But like the Plains Indians who herded bison over cliffs, or “buffalo jumps,” as they were known, lakers use these hard sunken structures to coral, confuse, and seize their milling prey.

The best winter trout locations are long underwater points with boulders, sunken humps and reefs, saddles between islands, necked-down channels, and high rock walls. But don’t discount the three most neglected lake trout hot spots: (1) walleye-looking shoreline food shelves in 10 to 20 feet of water; (2) isolated pockets or holes on 30- to 40-foot flats; and (3) shallow bays and coves.

The biggest mistake most anglers make is taking the scientific name of the lake trout—namaycush, Ojibway for “dweller of the deep”—much too literally. For most of the open-water season, lake trout are locked out of these shallow, productive, food-rich sections of the lake, because lakers flourish in water in the high 40°F to low 50°F range, and in summer, temperatures in these areas often approach twice that reading. But come winter, when every part of the lake, from a temperature perspective, is close to ideal for the cold-water-loving trout, they maraud these shallow sections like kids let loose once a year in a chocolate factory.

The catch, however, isn’t Hershey bars. It’s yellow perch. And you can score anywhere on shallow shoreline shelves, along the rims of the pockets, and in bays and coves leading into the main lake.

Trouty Horseshoes

Even on ideal, deep, easily recognized winter trout structure—points, reefs, humps, saddles, and bars—one section typically is overlooked by ice fishermen. That’s the inside turn. While most anglers concentrate on the top, tip, and sides of points, experienced cold hands select the inside turn every time.

Biologists and fisheries researchers who follow radio-tagged fish have repeatedly noticed a reluctance to move up and over obstacles. Instead, predator and prey alike prefer to follow constant contours and narrow depth bands—even if that means traveling around a structure as opposed to over it. So while lake trout will run a herd of cisco or smelt into the tip of a point, they create a hysterical feeding maelstrom when they coral a school into the rocky dead-end snare of an inside turn. That’s why the best turns are created when two long points jut out to create a huge, deep, underwater horseshoe-shaped trap with no escape.

The biggest lake trout I ever hooked—only minutes after we released a 37-pounder—was in an area like this. When it popped my 20-pound mono line during a railroad runaway, the noise reverberated off the high granite cliffs like the crack of a high-powered rifle.