Even those most experienced with fly fishing Lake Engures in Latvia have no idea how many pike it holds. Annually around five tons of them are taken home by spin, bait and fly fisherman. The lake is even fished commercially, though not at the weekends.
You can rent one of the rowing boats near the ornithology centre to fish on the lake. By the way, there are plenty of interesting birds in the lake’s environs. You could expect 30 to 50 attacks on you fly in a day. Not too shabby!
The best time to fish Engures is a quiet, windless autumn morning when the lake is flat calm. There are slight winds on the lake more of the time, but you might equally catch a clever pike at such times when the water’s surface is agitated by the breeze. On one side of the lake the wind cools the water, but you can find warmer, windless pockets or bays where the pike’s preferred temperatures are. And as the wind dies down in the evenings the pike start to get very active again.
Basically you can never predict what might happen, and you stand an excellent chance of catching a pike so long as you have at least two hands of water below your fly. This is the final installment for now on fly fishing in Latvia, but we may have more in the future.
