Took me a little while to get around to this but here's a summary of the trip.
Sunday - unorganized and left several hours late - camp not set up until about 1230. Would have been 12 if not for beer.
Monday - Half way from camp to launch, which is about 5 minutes, bearing on trailer blows. Spent the day going into lake cow, tiptons, to get it fixed. tiptons is awesome by the way, great service and really nice guy. Meanwhile the other guys checked out the flow.
Tuesday - well, first of all, on wednesday, a guy at the gas station was chattin about the fishin and said there were about a million boats at the west end of the lake. So there we are cruising out in the morning through the lake lookin for all the boats... but there are none. We had the lake to ourselves. We ended up just going past the lake to take a peak at the surf, which we had no intention of crossing, but there was no surf so we just kept going and joined a few guys fishing Whyac point. one guy had apparently lost one before we got there but that was it. After a while we ended up going a bit deeper and switching to anchovies. Thats when we nailed this hog:
ok well not a hog but I've never seen em so greeny blue. Are they always like that on the west coast? They don't look like that near malcolm anyways. Anyways, tonnes of those things out there and took most of our bait and finally put down a spoon and just when we'd pretty much forgotten whey we came here, we got this guy:
A beauty 32 marble. After that we tried anchoring up in the narrows for the flood, which looked something like this:
Actually to my surprise we did hook something in there but it was off before anyone could set the hook.
Wednesday - Hit the river today. Pretty sad story. I had only heard about all the snagging and seeing it was pretty brutal. River bank lined with people reefin em out by the tail. We went past them and found our own little pool where I (accidently) snagged and released this guy:
I'd say just while walking past the bend I saw about a dozen fish caught, and every single one was snagged. Its disgusting hearing guys bragging on the shoreline. One guy released a low 20's and another guys says to him "you didn't want that one!" to which he boastfully responds "I've already got one on the bank that size, now I want a smaller one" I am a very calm person but I wanted to just walk up to that guy and punch him in the face. How can you be so proud of yourself for snagging a fish like that? anyways, I don't know why a fisheries guy isn't down there - they'd make a fortune.
So we left that area and went way up the river to flyfish and look for chantrelles. little early for the shrooms, we got maybe a pound or a little more, and geoff got a huuuuuge cutthroat:
ok ok trick photography:
Thursday - last morning so we decide to head for the chuck again - this time the surf is pounding and we can't get out so we troll the lake to find that there are armies, yes armies, of jellyfish. It was completely pointless to troll in that mass of j's. We would not go more than 45 seconds without hitting one, and in the thick spots even less, including many double headers. this common???
So overall, weather was great and we got one nice spring, and it was an awesome trip. Will likely be back next year, but it sounds like a little earlier is better for the lake.
