In May the rainbows in Hammer Lake are so full of scuds that they ignore nearly everything else, and anglers who arrive with a box of chironomids go home thinking the lake is slow. The trout are feeding the whole time, on scuds in the weed, and some of them are big: rainbows to five pounds are common here, and the lake has given up trout far bigger than that.
Hammer is a small lake on the Bonaparte Plateau, a short way west of the south-west end of Bonaparte Lake, the long lake where most people go to troll. Think of it in two parts. There is the weedy margin, where the scuds and sedge live and where most of the fly fishing happens, and there is the open middle, which the trollers work.
The margin is where to start. The recreation site is a large, well-treed camp on the north side with its own launch, so you can be on the water within minutes of pitching a tent, and the weedy edge of the lake is scud water from ice-off on. Row along it slowly and fish close to the weed rather than out over open water.
The open water comes into its own when fish leave the shallows in the warm months. Spinning and trolling both take fish out there, and a fly angler can join in by rowing a sinking line and a leech slowly along the line where the weed ends and the colour darkens. It is quieter work than the margin, and it finds the fish that have gone down.
The reward is the evening sedge. When the big caddis hatch on the plateau lakes, Hammer’s rainbows come up for adults on the surface, and fish that ignored you all afternoon are suddenly in reach of a dry.
Bonaparte Lake is the obvious next stop, a few kilometres east, and the smaller lakes scattered through the timber around it are where the plateau keeps its surprises.
Fish in this water
Each fish is rated by its strongest evidence. A rating says how sure we are a fish is here, not how many there are, whether it is worth fishing for or whether you may keep it.
Likely
Older records here, recent stocking, a local guide or fly shop, a guide listing, or recent records on connected water nearby.
How to fish it
In scud season, anchor just outside the weed edge and cast in over it. Use a floating line or a slow intermediate, and fish a single olive or grey scud back in short, slow strips just over the weed tops. If nothing takes, lengthen the leader and let the fly go deeper before you start the retrieve. If that fails too, change to a chironomid under an indicator, set just off the bottom along the drop-off.
On sedge evenings, cast a Tom Thumb or a deer-hair sedge to rising fish and let it sit, then draw it a few inches. If fish swirl at it and turn away, change to a sedge pupa and pull it up through the top of the water. For the leech in midsummer, use a full-sinking line, count it down near the bottom along the drop-off, and if a pass draws nothing, row the next one a little shallower. One fly on the line, always.