fishingdoc.docx
I hope that you enjoy fishing at the river. You said that you went lake fishing as a kid a lot, so lots of the info here may be redundant with what you know and do. I'm not a professional angler, but I've done a lot of fishing on the river so I'll tell you what I've learned and what works well for me. I really like catching Rainbow trout. They're super feisty when you catch them and they're yummy. We no longer attempt to fillet them when we eat them, instead, I hot smoke them after a few hours of brining. After they are hot smoked, the spine lifts out of the meat, taking most of the pin bones with it, and the brine process assures a moist texture. I haven't done a bunch of fly fishing, but this year I started to pick it up again and I've found that you can catch rainbow in the shallower, faster sections with flies better than with any other method I've tried. The deep slow sections can be good for bass or walleye. But I use bait for them. So I usually go out with two setups: a small spinning rod and a fly rod. In all cases, I keep the gear super pared down so I can travel easily. I ride a bike into the area I want to fish, then I walk into the shore and work a section at a time. I have all my gear in a small, single bag that I carry messenger-bag style. Then I have a net that I carry over that. Aside from poles, I only carry a small pouch of bait, some #5 split shot, flies, floatant, needle-nose pliers, and a spare wedding ring. Often, I'll fish for walleye on a static weighted line while I work a section with the fly rod. It's important to note that this is technically two-pole fishing and as such requires two licenses. Be sure to pick up a Washington State Fish and Wildlife Guide before you set out. There are daily limits and size restrictions that determine what fish you can keep. These requirements change according to season and to the location of the river you are fishing. The walleye up here is legendary. Walleye is an excellent fillet fish: it has the same basic anatomy of snapper or rock fish, so filleting it down from the head across the backbone to the tail yields a perfect little boneless steak. It's excellent dusted with cornmeal and pan-fried in bacon fat in a hot cast iron pan. Walleye like deep slow water and they want a long tail on the worm. This kind of setup will scare the trout off usually. However, for moderately fast sections with a bit of depth, you can catch the monster rainbow with a bit more worm than normal. For walleye, I've had the best luck just setting the worm down on a deep section and keeping it still. Rainbows don't generally go after that. If you're going to use bait with Rainbow up here I'd use one of two methods - a #8 hook with a bit of worm or a bit of worm on a wedding ring. The wedding ring flashes and might stimulate an instinctual hit if the rainbow are not otherwise interested. However, there are a few small shore-hugging fast sections about 4 feet deep where you can pretty much bank on a rainbow by using the wedding ring. If you're just going with a hook/worm with rainbow mind your weight. If you can see a shelf under the water after a fast moving piece, then get your bait in just up-river and float the worm over the shelf, don’t weight it. This is why I use split shot: I can add or remove weight without fussing. The same float method is obviously great for fly fishing those shelf sections too. I just use simple stimulator dry flies for that. Keep the fly on top of the water and watch for the deep section off those shelves, if you float the fly across that enough times, you’ll see them come and strike. For channels, where water is emptying into a larger basin, I put just enough weight on there to push down the bait without bouncing it. For those same channels, you can get crazy hits with small mouth bass. These tend to hit at around midday in the summer. They prefer a bit more worm than the rainbow, but not as much worm as the walleye. Small mouth bass are the most fun to catch because they light up like crazy -- often launching out of the water when you hook them. Not like walleye, which can be sort of surreal to catch. Often it feels as if you’re hauling up an old branch the weight is so dead. As they get to the surface they explode with power. Anyway, bass are similar to walleye as far as filleting and preparation.
CurlyMedo
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