Near Isabella, Minn ? Pay attention, now. You may be able to learn from this, thus avoiding the humility that Tom Pfister and I experienced on a little trout lake the other day.

Day had hardly broken. The two of us were fishing side by side in Pfister’s Otter Lodge fishing shelter.

Pfister had caught a lot of splake on previous trips to this lake as recently as the day before. Splake are a hatchery-reared cross between brook trout and lake trout.

Sure enough, within moments of getting set up, I felt a solid thunk on my line and set the hook. Something of significant size began pulsing in the 8-foot depths, putting a serious arc in my medium-action rod.

I didn’t pull the transducer and cord of the electronic flasher from the fishing hole quickly enough. Within seconds, the fish had the line wrapped around the cord. Pfister bailed me out of that jam while I tried to keep tension on the fish.

When Pfister returned to his line, he had good news.

“Hey, I’ve got one, too,” he said. “Unless I’ve got you.”

That can happen, of course. A fighting fish can easily ensnare another line dangling mere feet away. When Pfister set the hook, he likely yanked the orange-and-gold Swedish Pimple I was using out of my fish’s jaw. But did that stop us? Oh, no.

Each convinced we had a nice fish on, we continued doing battle until I reeled my Pimple into the low light of the fishing shelter. Entangled in the hooks of my lure were the hooks of Pfister’s chartreuse-and-white Swedish Pimple. The lures looked as if they were holding hands.

The splake? He was long gone. Still, we thought, this was a good sign — a hit by 7:15 a.m. The bite was on.

We didn’t catch another fish until 11 a.m., when Pfister hauled up a modest 9-incher. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be the fast daytime feed Pfister had known here on earlier visits.

He prefers fishing splake on clear days of high-pressure systems, but we had drawn a cloudy morning with a chance of snow.

The lake we fished at is one of perhaps two dozen in the Isabella, Minn., area that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources stocks with splake, brookies or rainbow trout. Some lakes have both splake and rainbows. Splake are considered more aggressive winter biters, while rainbows provide more action during the summer, said Steve Persons, DNR area fisheries supervisor at Grand Rapids.

Pfister researches these “designated stream-trout lakes” on the DNR’s Web site (www.dnr.state.mn.us).

By searching for a specific lake, anglers can get the past few years’ stocking reports. Fish in these stocked lakes rarely reproduce on their own, so stocking provides a “put, grow and take” fishery.

Brook trout rarely live beyond three years, Persons said. Splake, however, live to be 4 or 5, so they tend to grow a little larger than brookies.

“You start adding years, and you’re more likely to see splake in the 18- to 20-inch size range,” Persons said. “Brook trout that size are unusual.”

Another reason anglers such as Pfister like splake fishing: They’re gorgeous. They look like brook trout in many cases, with red spots and orange bellies and fins that are orange and black and accented with white.