Lac Bottine Fishing Guide, Saguenay/Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec

• Overview

  Lac Bottine stands in Saguenay/Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec. The country here is boreal forest. Roughly 27 hectares: a morning covers one end, an afternoon the other. Shoreline comes to about 3.0 km, small enough to learn in a day. It is high ground by Quebec standards. Some 63 km away sits Saint-Fulgence, the nearest settlement. Sacré-Coeur is 70 km and Saint-Honoré 70 km. It sits well inside the county, so one set of rules covers it.

• Where to Fish on Lac Bottine

  The records we hold are silent on depth, so plan to find it yourself. Read the surface for the wind lane, then fish the edge of it. A soft bed grows weed late into autumn, which keeps fish shallow. Species logged across Saguenay/Lac-Saint-Jean include northern pike, Atlantic salmon and lake whitefish. Some of the species recorded here are protected or tightly regulated, so check what may be targeted before you fish. At Lac Bottine the water rewards a slow, careful approach.

• Seasonal Patterns

  Averages here run 15°C at the top of summer and -19°C at the bottom of winter. Everything is compressed into the middle of the year. The lid arrives early and lasts until roughly mid May. Break-up sits around mid May on average, with the water closing again about early November. Reckon on open water from spring through to late autumn, with May and June the strongest. On Lac Bottine that shapes the whole year.

• Tackle & Baits

  Our records carry no access rule either way. This is a natural basin, not a dammed one. No launch point is recorded nearby, so this is a bank water unless you carry a boat in. Pike mean a wire trace, no exceptions; big spoons and jerkbaits do the searching. Rules differ from one water to the next round here. Where tickets apply, they are sold in the nearest town rather than on the bank. Deuxieme lac a Rosaire, 1.4 km away, makes the obvious fallback. None of that is settled for Lac Bottine in what we hold.