So………….. Quite a few years ago I met a fellow from Oregon while vacationing in Belize. He was starting a lodge down there for his company, a company that specialized in sending folks to Pay to Play lakes in washington and oregon. I’ll leave the name of the company out here as i may or may not have done a couple of days guiding on one of said lakes for him at the time. In those two possibly fictional days I was quite amazed at how much fun I had. i had always been under the impression that pay lakes were full of deformed triploid sterile trout that grew huge by eating pellets and would take just about any fly tossed to them. The fish in these lakes were huge and easy to catch but they were wild fish that were left after the lake, which had once been a stream that flowed eventually into the Columbia River, was blocked by a huge beaver dam. The inflow creek eventually changed paths and the outflow dried up. A small tributary of the inflow still fed the lake with enough water for the trout to spawn in and there you have it, a fertile lake full of wild, naturally reproducing trout (steelhead?) on a private ranch owned by a family with no interest in fishing. There are plenty of these all over the United States due to the large private tracts of land. Eventually I lost touch of my friend but carried, in the back of my mind, a hankering to fish a private lake once again.
So this brings us to December 2009. At a christmas party for fly shop customers. A friend who, unfortunately, I only see once a year at these parties turned me on to a private lake in the Fraser Canyon that sounded similar to the ones I fished before. The difference is that this lake is a resevoir former from a dam on a creek and the trout come from the planting of wild fish. He told me stories of his trips there and when he told me the price, I couldn’t believe my ears. Less than half the price my friend in the states used to charge. I made some emails and planned a trip.
Somebody's going to catch fish!
Sarah and I were the only ones to book the lake for the 2 days last week. We had the entire lake and makeshift campsite to ourselves. We arrived on a cloudy Sunday morning and set up camp quickly in order to get at the rising fish on the small lake. We headed out in our Watermasters, 6 weights in hand, for the far side of the lake where I spotted a extensive weedy shoreline. The lake is so small that it only took 5 minutes of hard rowing to get 3/4 of the way across.
I could see on my fishfinder that the lake never got more than 17 feet deep as we crossed. As it started to shallow out to around 10 feet I told Sarah to go into stealth mode and we put the oars down and began to kick slowly with our flippers. We were dragging woolybuggers on floating lines. I was just about to tell her that fish were showing on the finder when my rod bent violently forward. I scrambled to get it out of the rod holder and heard sarah holler that she had a fish on. A double header within 10 minutes of launching. This was going to be fun.
The fish were unusually strong and quite arobatic. Cookie cutter 17 inchers. We proceeded to hook fish like these every 5 minutes or so. I don’t think either of us took note of how many we caught. There was one bay that we fished that yielded 4 big fish that were in spawning colors so we avoided fishing that area for the remainder of the trip.
A little dark for our liking
Several fish were hooked that felt like the big ones that we came for. We never landed anything over 22 inches though. Sarah almost landed one that she said was the biggest rainbow she’s ever caught (7 pounds is her largest). As she was trying to get it in the net I heard a sickening snap and watched the tip of her rod dissapear into the lake. The fish went beserk and snapped the tippet taking her fly and rod tip with it. She fished the rest of the day with the broken rod as the action was to good to bother going back to camp for another one. Besides, our other rods were 3 weights and wouldn’t be up to the task at hand. When we got tired of kicking, casting we moved into another bay close in to the weeds and dropped anchor. I had pumped one fish and had an exact matching choronomid pattern that we tried out. The indicator only floated for seconds at a time. The fish here were smaller though and the novelty wore off quickly.
A "little" Guy
The wind picked up and the temperature dropped at around 4 oclock. The bite slowed considerably as well (10 minutes between fish). We decided to head in and have dinner and then come back out for a night fish. Sarah hooked a few decent fish on the way back to camp.
Night fishing was unusually slow. By slow I mean that the fish were biting tentatively and we couldn’t get any to stick. I think the wildly changing weather was causing them to get picky.
It began to snow at night and in the morning we awoke to about an inch on the ground.
It was a tougher day of fishing. Cold and windy with wildly changing weather. We had everything from sun to snow or hail. We did manage to catch fish but it definately slower than the previous day. We packed up camp in the snow, satisfied with our time on the lake.
Would we do it again? Definately. But not often.
