Some of the depths you guys fish up North just boggle my mind.
Lake Superior has two varieties of Lake Trout: the red fin and the sissowet. The Red Fins are the eaters, the others are very oily and don't have much table fare. Those Sissowets get huge and they spawn as deep as 6oo feet. I marked a Sissowet trout once at 160 feet over 450 feet of water that rose up and chased our baits for about 1/8 mile before hitting and being boated. Its weighed in at 25 pounds. Its not unusual to take Red Fin at 125 feet while trolling, but most will come between the surface and 60 feet of trolling depth. A tactic we'll use while trolling and marking suspended fish is to run the balls down below the level of the fish and as soon as we re-mark the fish we'll pop the engine into neutral and pop the lines out of the clips letting the spoons flutter to the surface on loose lines, passing the fish on the spoons trip to the top. Many times those idle fish will be seen rising up and chasing the spoons but inevitably will get lost because they leave the cone angle of the transducer. When the line is retrieved is when the fish are felt hanging on the spoons. Crazy successful tactic.
We'll also use heavy banana head jigs tied with bucktail [Do-ItsJYS-1055l, 1-1/2 ounce and 2 ounce] with 90 pound test stinger wires cast in the heads and tipped with 1/0 trebles and sporting a dead smelt to vertically jig suspended Lakers if they are relating to some underwater feature like a sharp break or a hump. Jigging down to 125 feet is common. Its aggressive jigging and a lot of work but at times, such as mid-summer, is a better way to get fish than trolling.
Deep water is a Lake Trout's comfort zone. Any structure or bottom anomaly that attracts bait will attract Lakers if it is near enough for a comfortable horizontal shift from the deeper water. The breakwater I fish from has fishable Trout water anywhere from 25 feet to around 90 within an easy cast. The structure around the breakwater attracts tons of bait so the trout found there are feeding, not idle or resting which they prefer to do in much deeper water. Regardless of the water's depth, the higher a Trout is found the more I consider it a feeding and aggressive fish. Both fish pictured came from about 90 feet at the edge of the bottom structure directly under a slick that must have stalled affording relatively calm water: on either edge of that slick one could feel the undertow at work on the retrieve with little or no resistance felt on the lure's retrieve where the fish came from. I love slicks because they can hold so much food for baitfish and hence the predators. All of the positive factors that play into catching the Lake Trout just happened in front of me within a long cast. Twice.