We've got two kinds of Lake Trout up there: Redfin and Sissowet.
The Redfins are the eaters hands down. I don't smoke my lakers because I find them too good fixed on the grill. I put a double sheet of heavy foil down on a hot grill and poke a couple holes thru to drain the meat using a toothpick. I lay my trout fillets on the foil, skin side down and baste the top side with 1/4 cup of melted butter, chopped fresh dillweed and the juice of one lemon. I salt the baste lightly and coat the fillets heavy with it. The cover goes on the gril and comes off twenty minutes later. Wallah. Slide the foil of onto a cookie sheet, use a wide spatula to cut thru the meat but not the skin and then tease the meat free from the skin. The skin keeps the fat layer and the meat is as fat free as you can get it. I've served this during a party where several people claimed to NOT like fish and preferred chicken breast cooked for them only to find out how good the trout is and leave me with a pile of cooked breasts and not a pinch of left-over trout. If I do have some trout left over I pop it in the fridge and the next day crumble it into a bowl and add just enough cider vinegar to be able to mash the meat, which gets spread on crackers with some swiss cheese.
The Sissowets are oily enough to lube gears. I shudder when one of those suckers shows up on the line and when people come begging for trout to smoke
guess which ones get handed over.
Redfins have fins and backs very similar to the Brook Trout. The red fin coloration makes the id easy and when dressed out the Redfins have meat the color of salmon. The Sissowet is a yellowish meat but they do have the highest concentrations of omega 3 fatty acids of any fish known so they'd help un-plug your artreries. Redfins spawn on shallower sand and gravel reefs/beaches while the other will spawn at depths to 500 feet. The Sissowets get huge. I've hooked up on 30 pounders casting off the breakwater wall and that equates to about two hours of fishing time shot in the kiester. My largest laker was a redfin of 39 pounds taken off the wall and it took roughly 1 hour and 42 minutes to land. 6 pound line too, mind you. One 31 pound Sissowet ran me up and down the wall for almost two full hours once and it was pretty chilly that day. I had muscles balls and cramps for three days after that episode.
For anyone thinking about a trip to Superior for these fish, the absolute best time is the last two weeks of September. The trout are moving off the main-lake basin to come to shallower spawning waters and they feed like no tomorrow. All of the trout we took this trip had huge gullets full of smelt, so much so the smelt were sliding back out of the gut, but the trout kept eating. This period is also the best period for a heavy-weight. All of my big trout have come during this period. The fall-spawning salmons [coho and kings] will be all over the shore too. The Steelhead and Loopers follow the Salmon, so the shore is just packed with fish.
