Why do lake trout follow my lure all the way up without hitting?
The famous laker follow is real pursuit behavior, not indifference: a lake trout will track a jig or spoon for tens of meters (a hundred feet or more) of vertical water, matching its speed, deciding. Screens show it constantly — a mark rising with your lure. Two triggers convert followers. First, never slow down when you see the follow; speed up, because escaping prey accelerates and hesitation reads as wrongness. Second, the bottom-pound reset: drop the jig to bottom, thump it into the substrate a few times, and rip it upward — the puff of sediment and sudden flight imitates a flushed baitfish and takes fish that ignored everything else. If a follower peels off, drop straight back down; the same fish often eats on the second rise.
The full story
This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
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