Fishing Report 11-25-05

My buddy Tom Staley had asked me a few weeks ago about getting out to fish the week of Thanksgiving. Tom is a school bus driver and had the week off so we settled on going Tues. Remembering that Tom has an excellent smoking recipe for fish, I brought the kokanee rods as well as my full arsenal for bull trout.

With the heavy fog we have been experiencing here in Central Oregon the past week, we didn't get to the lake all that early. It was close to 9:00 a.m. by the time the boat left the dock. The fog was setting above us at the top of the cliffs. My guess was it was just above freezing. We had put the top up with all accompanying side curtains. The heater would feel good today. When the light breeze picked up I'm sure the wind chill was in the low 20's.

The lake is probably at its most beautiful this time of the year. With the water temps in the high 40's to low 50's, the algae is long gone. Often we are the only boat on the lake during the week days. Today was no exception....we had it to ourselves.

As I came out from the dock, I watched the graph to see if the bulls would be stacked up at the drop off around 90 feet like they had the previous two trips. There they were, just as I suspected. I made a hard left to follow the shoreline about 50 yards out. We started noticing several kokes popping the top just up ahead of us. Sure enough, when we went over them and the graph displayed a nice ball from 20-40 feet down. I couldn't resist so we set up for kokes with my new Shimano Talora kokanee rods and put out some Slingblades with Pro-Troll kokanee killers in copcar pattern. They had worked well on Sat. so I went right to them. Immediately the rods started hopping with the tell tale bounce of a kokanee. We were into them big time and stayed with several schools we marked until lunch. I think we had 7-8 with that many lost by 11:30.

I was interested in looking for some bulls, so we set up a B-16 Bomber and a flatfish then staggered the depths with the riggers at 45 and 65 feet and sat back to eat lunch. I headed toward the area that had held a lot of bulls this last weekend. When we got there we discovered that the schools of kokes and bulls weren't there in the numbers we had seen a few days before. Undaunted, I hung in there and we made a few passes before moving out to mid-lake again and continuing our search for some cooperating bulls.

Tom was really interested in loading up on some kokanee for the smoker and a little added treat for his relatives at Thanksgiving. We decided to move back to the general area we worked in the morning and found the koke balls basically right where we left them. We decided we would get to 15 and then finish the day dragging for bulls. By around 3:30 we were there. Time to put some more time in for the bulls.

Around 4:00 p.m. I finally noticed the rod with a 6 in. Lyman bouncing with a fish. Tom got on it and I cleared the other rigger and rod to get out of his way. When the bull got to the top we could tell it was a nice bull....long male. He was pretty skinny and could have weighed over 10 easily if he had filled out to his length. It went right around 7 LB. on my gripper scale. He was hooked right in the side of the mouth, so after two photos, I slid he back to fatten up for the winter. He had the biggest jaws of any male bull I had ever seen....looked similar to many of the big male browns I have seen. With no more bites we called it a day.

Look for my discount ad coming up for winter bull trout/kokanee combo trips soon. Some of the best fishing at Billy Chinook can be from now through Feb.

Tight Lines, Rick