Patrick and Greg: Pend Oreille River - 9/22

Patrick and I have heard rumors of nice walleyes in the Pend Oreille system. We thought we would give it a go. If nothing else, the PO river has some of the best bass fishing around. We fished from 11 AM to 630 PM. Caught a mixed bag of smallmouth and largemouth. No walleyes. No pike.

More info for club members: We launched Patrick's boat at the Oldtown ID launch which is just along the Highway bridge. It is a pretty nice ramp, but the dock where you tie up is a good 20 feet away. With a relatively swift cross current, it would be a challenge to launch a boat solo. We worked a variety of different baits from the highway bridge down the river several miles. Drop shot, jigs, blade bait, crankbaits and swimbaits. A few little smallmouth and a pikeminnow were all we had to show for our efforts. This part of the river has some VERY shallow water and Patrick's updated Navionics charts were useless until we got about 4 miles below the highway bridge. About 4 or 5 miles below the bridge, the river widened and became consistently deeper. Structure changed from rocky shorelines to gradual tapering banks with lots of weed growth. We trolled cranks for a while along weed beds and started to pick up a few largemouth bass. Patrick switched over to a top-water spook and began to hammer bass in the shallow weeds while I worked deeper water with a Flicker Shad. The bigger bass were in 6 to 10 feet of water and the Flicker Shad once again proved to be my go to lure.