Washington Fishing Trip

Last week I ventured up to Washington to catch some big fish. Every year when I was in PT school, my friend would go home for spring break and come back with pics of big cutts from a lake in Washington. I told him that as soon as we graduated, I would plan a trip up there to catch some of those fish. The lake I went up to fish is called Lenore, and as luck would have it we did not catch anything from this lake. This lake is about 4 miles long, but very skinny, and every spring the cutthroats in this lake pod up on one end of the lake to spawn. Unfortunately, it warmed up quickly in Washington this year, so we were too late for the spawn. However, we did have a back up plan which did produce some nice fish.
After being skunked from Lake Lenore, we headed over to Lake Lenice. Above is the first fish I landed. This fish was just shy of 22 inches. He took my "calder fly" which was the best fly of the day, until I broke off later that afternoon and did not have any extras.

Jarron caught this one right before we went home on a olive damsel fly with a burnt orange tail.

Above is a typical fat rainbow from Lenice. Overall we caught a lot of big and fat rainbows, with the smallest being around 17 inches. We did the best with all white buggers, and denny rickard seal buggers in olive with the burnt orange tail, and of course the "calder fly".

Our second day of fishing, we headed over to Rocky Ford which is a spring creek close to Lake Lenore. This river is slow and shallow, almost like fishing a lake, and if full of PIGs that you can see everywhere.

Above is Jarrons brother Rory with a huge rainbow that took a black bugger with no hackle that was dead drifted. This fish was probably around 7-9 lbs and was 24 inches long.

Typical rocky ford rainbow.

At Rocky Ford we did fairly well until the wind picked up to about 40 mph gusts. We caught most of our fish on a tan zebra midge and also a yarn egg pattern that Jarron named the Rocky Ford egg. We also caught some on olive scuds and black buggers.

Our third and final day of fishing we headed over to Amber lake which is just outside of Spokane.

Fishing here started fairly slow for us. We did end up catching some nice fat rainbows that averaged 16-18 inches. Here we used blood worms and red chironomids. Then one guy told me that the fish were stacked up in front of the boat dock spawning because it was the only place in the lake that had sand. After that I tied on Jarron's Rocky Ford egg and did really well.