Being primarily a saltwater angler, I am less experienced with freshwater fishing, but the smell of a beautiful rainbow trout on the smoker always tempts me to bring out the wedding rings and night crawlers every year. We started off the day by fishing at Bill's Boathouse. I am new to American Lake, so we thought this historic dock would be a good place to start. This is a pay to fish dock, $4.25 per adult. It has a long history of giving up big bass and huge rainbow trout. I fished green Powerbait and a worm off the bottom for the first couple hours, then switched to a white curlytail for crappie and perch in the shallows. The action was slow, and only a couple people caught small trout. I managed to get a few small bluegill.
After a while we decided to rent a boat ($65 for a pontoon boat for 4 hours!) and try our luck trolling wedding rings and worms. Bill's Boathouse has a variety of boat rentals, from rowboats to large pontoon boats, all reasonably priced. We trolled the northern shore slowly and it wasn't long before we had bites. We each landed a trout, one on a green wedding ring and the other on a black and gold one. They were fat 12 inch trout with nice orange meat, perfect for the smoker. The boat didn't come with downriggers or fish finders, so we tried weights of .5oz to 1.5oz. Most of our bites came on 1oz. We lost a few more fish and had many bites but were unable to land more after 3 hours of trolling. Another boat also trolling with wedding rings and worms reported they had 4 fish and also lost several. I think if we had started trolling earlier we would've landed more fish, but nonetheless it was a great day learning a new lake.

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