Following The Winds

With the weather holding stable and sunny, I just had to get back again to battle more salmon & hopefully browns today. I immediately called Norm, seeing as how my wife had to work today and he accepted the invitation with open arms. It’s always better when you have someone to share the gas expenses with not to mention the company! There wasn’t any real need to get there too early as generally speaking, the best fishing occurs during the afternoon anyway. Arrival time was about the same as Wednesday and once more we were fishing before 10:00 A.M. The weather was a beautiful sunny one with temps near 45 degrees when we started and over 50 degrees by days end. Winds were still from a horrible N direction but switched to the west late in the afternoon. They weren’t too bad at 5 to 10 in the morn and 10 to 15 later on. This was not looking good for us as we trolled for over an hour without even a sniff. I was going over all kinds of bait in deeper water and knew that there had to be dome salmon & trout in the area as well. We tried shallow, mid and even deep water before finally, one of the reels actually went off. Ironically enough, I had just marked a couple of fish around a ball of bait seconds before in about 18 feet of water. Thankfully, one of them ate! The skunk was officially out of the boat as a plump 17-inch silver bulled went in the livewell. We trolled around for quite a while afterwards without even a touch and I knew that a move was about to happen. This was the day that I was going to explore some new water and dashed off to the other side of the lake looking for some action. Unfortunately, the fish weren’t cooperating there either and we moved once again. The reel fired within minutes at this place over 35 feet of water and I really thought we were into something. Unfortunately, the tiny salmon of 14.5 inches had to be released and we never got another touch again. After hitting about 4 or 5 other spots, I decided to head back to where we started to see if the fish had turned on and was I glad I did. Less than 3 minutes after we had the fourth rod out, the long line started screaming and the game was on. A lengthy battle was had before the almost 19 inch salmon came aboard and we finally had a couple in the livewell. For the next couple of hours, the action was just insane. We had doubles, triples and one missed quad landing both browns and salmon before the clouds moved in threatening us with rain. The winds had changed to the west blowing all the warm water into one area and that was where the fish were. This was also where we were for the remainder of our day as well! Several of the browns were decent with the largest going about 3 pounds and they’re always a bonus fish. By 6:00 P.M. we decided to call it quits and head home. In the entire day leading up to the last 2 hours, we had only managed to land 4 fish with a perch and white bass as 2 of them. The last couple of hours however, accounted for almost 25 fish making the day just incredible. It’s amazing what a little wind from the proper direction and some warmer water can do for the activity level of these fish. What an incredible afternoon that we got to experience!