SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

Roanoke Times Outdoors Editor Mark Taylor releases a brook trout caught in Skidmore Lake trolling with an attractor rig.

Photos by SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

Above: Skidmore Lake covers 118 acres and the clear water is cold and deep enough to support trout year round. Below: Roanoke Times Outdoors Editor Mark Taylor cooks dinner by lantern and fire light following a good day of fishing on Skidmore Lake.

Photos by SAM DEAN The Roanoke Times

Above: Skidmore Lake covers 118 acres and the clear water is cold and deep enough to support trout year round. Below: Roanoke Times Outdoors Editor Mark Taylor cooks dinner by lantern and fire light following a good day of fishing on Skidmore Lake.

Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.

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RAWLEY SPRINGS, Va. -- Viewed from a mountaintop above it, Skidmore Lake seems a little out of place in Virginia.

Blue in hue and surrounded by heavily forested ridges, it seems more like a lake that belongs in Maine's mountains, or maybe California's Trinity Alps, rather than sitting in the Alleghany Highlands about 30 miles west of Harrisonburg.

On a recent weekday afternoon there was something else appealing about Skidmore: It was vacant.

It wouldn't be for long.

Roanoke Times photographer Sam Dean and I, here to explore Skidmore for the summertime series we are doing on some of Virginia's small public lakes, would soon be on the water in a little johnboat, trolling for trout.

But we couldn't fish just yet.

Skidmore is about a 2 ¹₂-hour drive from Roanoke, so we had decided to make this trip an overnighter. Before fishing came setting up camp.

We had envisioned finding a lakeside site but those hopes were quickly dashed.

Numerous signs noted that lakeside camping is off limits, which is understandable considering that Skidmore is a water supply reservoir for Harrisonburg.

The lake is surrounded by U.S. Forest Land, and just a short drive above the lake we found a well-used site next to the road.

The site wasn't ideal, with previous occupants having left behind litter and what looked like 1,500 cigarette butts around the fire ring. But it would have to do.

Photos by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Mark Taylor releases a brook trout caught in Skidmore Lake trolling with an attractor rig.

Mark Taylor cooks dinner by lantern and fire light following a good day of fishing on Skidmore Lake.

Camp set, we launched our boat about 4 p.m.

Covering 118 acres, Skidmore is cold and deep enough to support trout year round, so the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries manages it as a put-and-grow fishery.

Fingerling brook trout are stocked annually, and they grow well. The lake has produced trout pushing 3 pounds, so the DGIF has established a minimum size limit of 10 inches for trout to help capitalize on the lake's trophy potential. The daily bag limit is six.

So far this summer Sam has stuck with fly-fishing gear, and he wanted to on this day. But he also knew that it would be all but impossible to reach the deep-holding trout with fly gear, so he joined the dark side for a day.

There may be special, effective ways to trout fish in Virginia's lakes. But I don't know them.

What I know are the tactics we used in Oregon's high mountain lakes during my childhood.

Among them, the best was to troll using flashy attractors ahead of bait or a lure.

I haven't been able to find that kind of gear here since The Bait Place at Lake Moomaw closed, so I called my dad and he was kind of enough to send me several sets of Doc Shelton attractors.

A Doc Shelton attractor features several in-line spinner blades behind a plastic or metal rudder that reduces line twist. Behind the 18- to 24-inch-long attractor is a leader ranging from 1 to 3 feet, to which is attached a baited hook or a trout lure, such as a spoon.

We went with bait -- a half of a nightcrawler.

Not five minutes after we started, one of the rods started bouncing, and in came a feisty brook trout.

The fish was beautiful and fat, but only 8 inches long, so back it went.

Twenty minutes later we hooked up again. That fish looked a little bigger, but it came off right at the boat.

The next fish didn't come off, but it was also short.

The action was steady, with catches coming every 15 or 20 minutes. A couple of times we caught two fish at once.

And they were all too short.

We wondered if we just weren't getting deep enough to reach the larger trout. So I added another ¹₂-ounce weight to one of the rigs. That didn't attract any larger fish, either.

Still, as we loaded up the boat as the sun was setting, we couldn't complain.

We'd had the lake pretty much to ourselves -- a couple of kayakers showed up that evening -- and the action had been steady.

While the lake was quiet and peaceful, the same couldn't be said for our camping area.

Just up the road from us was a group that included either a strangely barking dog or strangely screaming child.

The noise was one thing. The fact that they seemed to get their jollies driving their minivan at 60 mph up and down the gravel road was more worrisome, and we fully expected to hear a crash before the night was over.

Fortunately they settled down eventually and things got quiet.

The next morning we were back on the lake, with plenty of company as several groups of anglers arrived with small boats.

Wayne Bilyard of Mount Clinton was among them.

He's a regular at Skidmore, drawn by the beauty, but also by the trout.

"I've seen trout up here this big," he said, holding his hands at least 2 feet apart. "One day we were down by the spillway and we saw a huge one. My wife put a nightcrawler right on its head, but it just swam away."

Skidmore also has good numbers of warm-water fish, including largemouth bass, sunfish and rock bass.

We spent some time bass fishing in the morning, and saw some nice fish in the clear water. But they wanted nothing to do with our offerings so we went back to trolling for trout.

Larger brookies proved elusive to us again, though we finally caught our first 10-incher.

As we made a final troll back toward shore I wasn't thinking about what could have been, but what could be. After another couple months in the rich lake, those dinks we were catching won't be such dinks.

And they'll be worth another trip.