A Day on the Water

Started at Tippy Dam at noon.  Fishing was very slow, fishermen were leaving.  Kings are all dead, few Coho jumping.  A the tail out and another easy spot I like, no bites.  When fishing is bad, I don't experiment much but stick with the few flies I think are best.  Yellow beads, and lately the Nuke Minnow Jig.   At 1:30 I moved upstream to the fast snaggy water.  Its hard to wade and hard to follow fish downstream. I was dialing in the depth to try get close to the bottom without snagging. On the 8th drift the bobber went down.  The hook set was met big violent...

 Friday morning. this Chinook pinched the tips of his hooked jaw down on a Nuke Minnow Jig pattern drifting under a bobber in 9 feet of water.  I gave him to the guy who netted him for me.  If it had been a female I would have released her so her eggs could support the brown trout that grow big an fat eating Salmon Eggs. I also hooked a small brown on that jig in faster water.  What the browns really wanted were mainly 8mm glow yellow beads drifted near the bottom.  I also hooked a 5lb slender silver steelhead...

Looked for Large Mouth Bass in some new channels and weedy pockets back off the main current of the North Channel.  A 13 inch Smallmouth rushed the popper without getting hooked on the edge of a narrow side channel.  A 16 inch Pike ate a new white 3/0 Banger on the edge of the main channel and he quickly cut it off when I applied a little pressure on him.  I headed across to a favorite shoreline with a very used 3/0 Chartreuse Banger as the best backup I had brought.  The Marabou tail and Flashabou was worn sparse and short.  It has...

September 10th, there was no Salmon slime, blood or eggs on the stairs. Below the coffer (a low dam the fish can run over) there were only a few fishermen throwing lures or bottom bouncing.  I only saw 3 good fish rise in about 3 hours.  One looked like a 20 inch Skamania, a hatchery strain derived from slender wild summer run steelhead from Washington State's Washougal River.   It happened to rise inches from my bobber in shallow water.  Reportedly, the smaller 2 year wild Washougal River fish were very game and would rise well to dry flies.   In the big pool...

  Wakely Lake is a long drive and a long way to drag a kayak full of fly gear just to land a few (6) bass12 to 16 inches.  I was busy with many smaller  bass, a couple bluegills and a pumpkinseed.    The best pattern was to cast Poppers to lily pad edges across deep, scattered, upward growing pond weed.  Then 3 pops and a pause.  Today, like last week, a Lime Chartreuse Bug Popper pattern was much better than black.  Fishing deep with a bead head Clouser (Popovic's Jiggy) in Chartreuse and White got a small pike and fast action on...