Equipment

The best rods to bring are five and six weight fast-action models in nine-to-ten-foot lengths. In windy conditions you want to be able to cast streamers or mice patterns. At the same time, you want a reasonably stiff rod to fight these heavy fish in quickly to ensure a quick and safe release. If you want to fish our small streams, we recommend a four weight in seven-to-eight-foot lengths. A decent reel with a quality drag system and large arbor is also recommended. For flylines, you will want to bring a quality WF floating line for casting dry flies, mice patterns and small streamers. We also recommend you bring an intermediate flyline and a sinktip line for exploring deeper shoals and drop-offs with streamers. Tapered leaders work well but for tippet sizes, we strongly recommend you DO NOT go below 3x. These Brook Trout are big and powerful, we’ve seen many dry fly takes break-off 4x tippets. For streamers, don’t go below 12lb strength and we recommend 2x to 0x to avoid break-offs.

Mercier Lake has quite a few hatches throughout the season. The most noteworthy mayfly hatches are: March Browns, Brown & Green Drakes, and Hexagenia. The Brook Trout are really focussed on the Green Drakes and March Browns which are massive sizes, much like Hexs. Tie fly patterns to match these hatches in sizes 8 to 14, with special emphasis on sizes 8 & 10. They really seem to pick out these bigger flies in a crowded hatch! Parachute Adams, Stimulators, 

There are numerous caddis hatches and we are working to identify them all. We recommend you bring Elkhair Caddis in tan/green/orange in sizes 10 to 16 and Goddard Caddis in the same sizes which should work in most situations. 

There are minnows, sculpin and small Brook Trout in our watershed. The number one colour that has consistently caught fish is BLACK. Weighted strip leeches in sizes 2 -8 are ideal as are similar fly patterns. Recommend you bring them in black, olive, dark brown and purple.

Mercier Lake possesses a large population of Northern Pike that average 25 to 35 inches in length. However, we often catch much larger Pike that are 38 to 42 inches in length that are VERY fat and healthy. A 40+ inch Pike will weigh between 25 to 30 pounds! Catching these leviathans on a fly is quite exciting, both surface and subsurface. Good fly choices are Weedman’s Slide for topwater pike in black, orange and especially chartreuse. For sub-surface fishing, large deceivers or strip leeches in szies 1/0 to 4 are perfect. Darker colours seem to work best though we have noticed chartreuse is a deadly colour to use.