Sad to say, it’s been a while since I caught a salmon. The last ones I caught were back in Nov 2015, lucked out my first year of fly fishing. Since then, no luck with the fly, trolling, or ice fishing. Well I had this past week off, so between two trips out to the big lake I boated 3 slot togue and one salmon.
The first trip on Tuesday, We got many short strikes and long distance releases, results with both spoons and smelt. Several were very hard and aggressive hits that were gone by the time we picked the rod out of the holder, and just had our bait stolen.
We landed two of these that day
That day fishing just under the surface worked well, and even the eagles were getting in on the togue action. Just before that fish hit, we saw a eagle dive for a fish. We got distracted with getting our own fish into the boat, so we didn’t see what the eagle was doing. after we released that fish, and started to bait the line, we noticed that the eagle was floating on the water flapping its wings. We set our stuff down and got closer to make sure it wasn’t injured, prepareing to call the wardens or animal control.
I just wished I kept filming for even a few more seconds, as we found out why that eagle couldn’t fly back up from the water. As he finished hauling himself up on the rock, we saw he was still holding onto a thrashing togue about the same size as the one I had caught. After a few minutes resting on a nearby tree, he swooped back down and retrieved his prize. Later on we saw an osprey grab a very large crappie up in the river.
On Thursday, for the second trip I had tied up new slider rigs. this time I went with a treble instead of single for the rear hook, and set the treble further back by the tail instead of up by the anal vent.
My friend wanted to avoid the circus by the river, so we went to check if fish are still at another spot. We Still marked lots of bait out there so we started trolling. Finally stuck one and got it to stay hooked. I had 5 colors of lead core out on a fly rod and reel, so it took a while to pull in. With two colors out still, she took a couple jumps and thrashed around at the surface for a while, then swam circles around the boat for a bit before we finally got her in the net. The hook dropped out as we lifted the net into the boat. She measures out at 22”
Her and a another slot togue were all we caught before the rain picked up. I managed to get out and fish every other day this past week, starting with the little wild brookies on a rainy Sunday, togue and salmon tues and thurs, then ended on sat with a very windy day of bass fishing
Also caught the first open water sunfish and a medium pickerel, but the fish were overall uncooperative that day too. The constant weather change of this past week has made it pretty slow fishing for me, at least that’s what I’m going to blame it on lol. I’m just happy I avoided a skunking this week, and getting that salmon to net.
