Today was a good day. I caught fish.

I left home at 0530 (5:30 AM) and met up with Bill F and Howard over in Bonney Lake and we headed up HWY 410 towards the north side of Mount Rainer. It is a 90 mile drive to Leech Lake, crossing two mountain passes (Cayuse and White). The weather was perfectly clear with a stiff breeze from the east. We arrived at Leech Lake at 0745 and got ready to hit the water. I brought my pontoon boat, and Howard & Bill had float tubes. Later on that afternoon, Bill A. joined us on the lake and everyone was catching fish.

I was using my Sage XP 9 foot 3 weight rod. It has enough backbone to still be able to cast a fairly heavy fly in a strong wind and the fish feel great on it. I spent the first hour trying to get the fish to hit my flies. I changed flies every 10 minutes searching for what they wanted. By that time I was down at the far west end of the lake and the wind was really picking up. I slipped into a small cove to change flies again and noticed a few fish hitting something on the surface. I never did see what the hatch was, if there was one. I suspect they fish were going after bugs that were being knocked into the lake by the wind. Deciding that it would be nice to go out into the wind and toss out my two anchors, hence not have to fight the wind, I put on a Parachute Adams and anchored a couple hundred feet from shore. Immediately I had a couple of hits but no connections.

After about 10 minutes I decided to try adding a little color and put on a Parachute Royal Coachman. Now that did the trick. I started catching fish and I was also having three to four times as many hits between fish. They were hitting so hard they were missing the flies a lot. I later tried a size 12 Royal Wulff and it worked well to.

The game department had planed Triploid Rainbows earlier in the week, but I was catching wild Brook trout and happy to be doing so. Those Brookies out fought the Triploids two to one, the guys have a lot of heart. Last year a big Brookie from Leech Lake was around 11 inches. This year I caught a huge 14 incher, a 13 incher and all the others were 12 to 10 inches with one being about 6 inches. This tells me that the fish wintered very well and had plenty of food to eat under all that ice. The lake is at an elevation of about 4550 feet, just below the top of White Pass. During the winter it is totally covered in ice and thick snow.

I usually don?t count my fish but Howard was counting and that got my mind into a count mode. I got off the lake at 3:30 PM with 20 fish to the pontoon boat, consisting of 18 Brook trout and 2 Triploid Rainbows, the biggest Rainbow as 15 inches. I lost of number of fish from long line releases but I did not count those. When I left, Howard was on 21 fish and still counting. Both Bills were also doing well.

The lake was 59.3 degreed (f) when I started fishing and 63.5 when I left. It was very hot but the strong wind kept it livable and kept the bugs away. As I drove down the west side of White Pass it was 99 degrees.

I took a number of photos, I will download them, sort through them and pick a few for viewing.

See my Blog at: http://www.flyanglersonline.com/bb/blog.php?b=116


Larry ---sagefisher---