Central Oregon Fishing Report 7/11/06

One of my friends from church had helped me make my house move back at the first of June. I had promised Ken and his son Scott a full day of fishing when things got settled. This past Thurs. we made an early morning run to East Lake to see if the browns were on or not.

We got there around 4:45 and watched the Tui Chubs busting around the docks as we unloaded and got the boat in the water. Scott was amazed at how the temps had dropped to the high 30's from the 50's when we left Bend. This is not uncommon even in summer when you take the 2500 foot elevation change into account.

I started out in front of the resort working water of 20-30 feet with the riggers and leadcore to reach fish that appeared to be holding at 18-25 feet. It was amazing how many BIG fish we marked. Unfortunately, marking is mostly what we did. It was around 7:30 before I finally hooked a 13 in. dink brown on leadcore. I thought maybe we would get something going but they weren't cooperative at all.

I changed locations a few times and finally suggested that we switch over to fish for kokanee. These guys were not that die-hard about staying with the brown trout drill after several hours of little action. It was a good move. We hooked up on the first kokanee in the "white slide" area at 20 feet, but there didn't appear to be many fish around from what the graph told me. We decided to look fro some schools.

Full circle, back in front of the resort, we found lots of kokanee in the same water we marked the browns earlier. My usual set-up was doing the trick with longer than usual setbacks. Watermelon Slingbades with watermelon kokanee killers was the hot ticket followed by a chrome Abe &Al dodger with a hot pink killer.

The main bite lasted a couple of hours and we landed 13 kokanee out of 16 hooked with tough wind conditions.

Though I would have much rather fished for the browns, I was glad we changed up and caught fish. To show you how quickly things can turn around, I had no sooner got home than I got an email from a friend from the valley who was checking up to see how we did.

Ryan Daniels and Brian Wildish were heading to East on Sat. Their report was much better success on the browns than we did. They landed 10 browns to around 3 LB. and had a couple of bigger fish on.

Also, congrats to Ryan Webb from Nevada who landed a 12 LB. hookjaw from Wickiup after a week stay at the lake. The monster brown came on a A/C plug right at dark off the top. The was his first serious trophy brown trip......how lucky can you get???

This Tues. morning, my grandson Colin and I are headed to a local brown trout lake and then will end up at Wickiup before heading home,Thurs. night. Colin got his biggest brown at 8 LB. last year from the nameless lake. The water in Wickiup is the highest it has been in years and it could be a banner summer on the browns.

We are working diligently to finish up the first in a series of trophy trout videos called "Monster Bulls", that will be out this summer. It was filmed right after the TV show we filmed at Billy Chinook and features some excellent action footage of big bull trout. Look for it on sale at the site in Aug.

Look for the report for the upcoming trip this weekend.

Tight Lines, Rick