Smallmouth on Sammamish

The air is starting to warm up this late May. Sixty counts as a good spring day in these parts. No wind and the American Bald Eagles were fishing low to the water today.

I took out my Outcast Fat Cat float tube in search of smallmouth bass, perch and maybe a cutthroat or kokanee. I saw plenty of little kokanee fry splashing around on this cloudy Sunday afternoon. I looked for smallmouth around the ample boat docks on the South end of Lake Sammamish.

I thought I felt a little tug at the end of one boat dock but that was about it for a solid hour or so. Finally I headed back to my launch point where there is a heavily wooded area with lots of submerged roots and fallen trees.

I had a 6-weight with an intermediate tip but set it aside and went with my Winston 5-weight we a brown Woolly Bugger. I cast back into some fallen trees and finally felt a convincing bite. I set the hook and found this little guy, a perch of some sort. (Might be a crappie.) Not a great fighter but a pretty fish.

Within a cast or two I noticed some fry jumping close to a bramble of trees and I cast just about where I saw the last splash. The take was not a crushing blow but my 5-weight doubled over pretty good. Once the fish realized he was hooked the rod tripled over and line began to peel off the reel. I suspected at this point that I had my first smallmouth on a fly. I really wanted to land this one so I played him, letting the fish make run after run.

The fish was probably 15 inches and fat, likely a pound and a half.

This opens up some new fishing for me nearby. I hear they also are on Lake Washington so I will give that a try as well.

No, I didn't keep anything. It's more fun to catch 'em, shoot 'em and let 'em go.

Winter wanderings

I am not going to kid you. Winter fishing is just very hard for me. I don't catch a lot of fish between January and March. And the the truth be known I would catch even fewer if not for trips to Oklahoma in November and December.

I finally got around this week to downloading some old photos. Dad, Ryan and I fished over Christmas break on the Lower Illinois in northeast Oklahoma. It's nice to see Ry and Dad geared up in the parking lot...

...and as we walk down the path to find a beat below the dam. Walking that path is now one of my favorite walks in the world.

On Feb. 10 I fished with the wonderful and notable flyfishing guide, John Farrar. This a great photo of him in his Canadian-built boat on the Skagit, where we fished for Dollies and Steelhead. One of the guys in our group caught a couple of Dollies but we didn't get into any Steelhead. Nevertheless, it was a great trip and I got some good instruction on the Snap-T spey cast.

Over the kids' mid-winter break I fished for surf perch near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Nada.

I did manage to catch a dozen or so rainbows at Lake Alice near Fall City in Washington state. I took my Fat Cat float tube out on a sunny Sunday and did quite well with a brownish wooly bugger.

Lake Alice.....

Sea-run cutthroats on Puget Sound

My dad and I fished the south Sound on April 22. Our guide, Chris Senyohl, did a fantastic job of getting us into fish quickly.

Our biggest of the day were 18" and 19". We also caught plenty of 12-13 inchers.

We fished almost exclusively a clouser pattern.

As the photos show, the weather was great. We finished an outgoing morning tide and the very early stages of an afternoon incoming tide.