Jim K: Roosevelt - 5/25

Fished with my son Seth on memorial day.  We spent entire day on the water, kept 2 walleye and one trout. Lost at the boat were two large eyes and one SMB.  After we figured out our jigging pattern, we finally ended up having consistent bites, but that wasn’t until the last two hours of the day.

For SWC:

We launched out of Fort Spokane at 7:15AM… only 8 rigs in the parking lot.

We ran quite a bit upstream and finally stopped where current was creating a large eddy.  I was casting green and brown plastics on 1/2 oz jigs.  After 20 minutes I worked my way around various parts of the structure and pulled in a 18” eye.  I had Seth cast where I did, and he immediately hooked up with a similar eye.  Thought there would be more, but this was all we caught in this location.  We continued to leap frog our way upstream, stopping at several pockets where current was forming an eddy, or where we could find a current seam, but had zero luck pitching jigs.  Seth desired to throw cranks, and soon hooked a large SMB, but lost it at the boat.  We did bottom bounce with worms and smile blades for about 2 hours by buoy 1, but without a bite.

By now, I realized that I hadn’t found any concentrations of walleye to speak of anywhere on my electronics… just very random single fish.  Knowing the eyes are in the area, to me this means the fish are mostly along the bank, so we switched back to pitching jigs or cranks in water less than 15’ along the banks.  I’m trying, but only having some success as I learn the details of this fishing technique.  I have quite a ways to go to match walleyemark’s success with this technique as he describes on his reports on Northwest Fishing Reports.

After working our way up almost to marker 5, and back, we stopped where we had success first off this AM.  Seth noticed the Kokanee and trout jumping, so he began chunking a white panther martin, and soon landed a nice trout.  With the kokanee in the area, I switched to white plastics and finally began to have regular bites.  In the last 1.5-2 hours, I lost two large walleyes, one about 24” while trying to teach Seth how to land fish with a net.  I also had several other bites, but failed to hook them.