Travis: Snake River - 11/16
My fishin' buddy and I spent last Saturday on the Snake. Knowing there would be morning fog, we took it easy and left Spokane about 10AM and were at Lyon's Ferry about 12:30 or so.
We started up at the grainery, as I just refuse to give up on that spot. It paid off, when I picked up 2 on the first pass. One was a 19" and the other was a 20". Those were both caught on the #213 which is one of Wicked Custom's Firetiger Patterns.
We trolled East along that shoreline, but didn't pick up another fish for quite a while. After getting to the point across from the Tucannon, we decided to pick up and head down to the mouth of the Palouse which is where the other 5 boats that we saw, were concentrating. Immediately we started marking big fish. In fact, I don't think I've ever marked as many big fish in the Snake as I did on Sat. But of course, finding them is only the first challenge. Then you need to entice them to bite, which they refused to do for a while. As you know with this time of year, when the sun starts to go down, the process lasts about 3 minutes. It was 3:45 when we got to that area and it was dark in what felt like 20 minutes.
All of the other boats cleared out and we started night fishin'. Both of us were trolling chartreuse bandits. My buddy was trolling a chartreuse/orange combo and I was using a Chartreuse/Black. We had heard multiple reports from Allan and others that Chartreuse was paying the bills down there lately. My buddy picked up his first down by the railroad bridge and soon had another right behind it. His first was a nice 20" eater and the second went 22". He had a third walleye in the boat by the end of that pass and by this time, it was fully dark. We noticed that our best luck was coming from trolling with current and doing about 1.25 mph. All fish were picked up between 25-30 ft of water. On our second to last pass, right by the Hwy bridge, going with current, the big girl hit. She took it down hard, and I knew instantly that I had a good one on.
She took a few minutes to get into the boat, and she fell off in the net, so she wasn't hooked the best, but all of the fish on Saturday had solid/legitimate strikes. I also noted that those 20 inchers seemed to put up way more fight than they normally do. I even mistook one of mine for a bigger fish, and had to admit to crying a bit of wolf, when we got it into the net.
The big girl was CHUNKY! I guess I somewhat expect for a 30" fish, (which she was on the nose) to be in the 10 lbs. range, this girl was 11.36 lbs. ! Clearly she was trying to put on some winter weight! To my disappointment, we probably have that in common. We snapped a few pictures and back she went. We did one more pass, with no luck. We may have stayed longer, but there was a mist/fog forming in the air and seeing anything at all to get your bearings, without getting vertigo or some variant of it, was getting difficult. Not wanting to have to navigate using only my electronics, we decided to call it a night. We ended the day with 5 great eaters for the dinner table and one big chunky gal for the camera.
Good Luck!
Congrats, Travis! 11.36lbs