by Dave Graybill, March 26, 2013

What a week for weather. I have experienced snow, rain and high winds, but it didn’t keep me from having some great fishing first on the Yakima River and then at Lake Chelan. Weather for the coming week is much more mild and I would suggest that you get out take advantage of it.

Last Wednesday my fishing buddy Rollie Schmitten and I floated the Yakima River. We went with Johnny Boitano of the Troutwater Fly Shop in Ellensburg. I floated the river a bit earlier last year, and had a spectacular day catching rainbow on stones and nymphs. He wanted me to come down when there was a chance to catch some fish when the Skwalas were hatching.

It was snowing when we left Leavenworth and grey when we arrived at the shop in Ellensburg. Johnny wanted to show me a new stretch of water and launched the boat shuttled to rigs to float the lower canyon down to Rosa Dam. It was still chilly when we began and we started off fishing stones with a nymph dropper. Schmitten was into fish right away, and the rainbow were eating the stone flies. The sun caught up with us as we made our way down river, and Boitano switched over to dry Skwala patterns. It was really cool to see the fish come up to these as they floated down next to the bank. Sometimes you would see a head come up and suck it down, but usually they would really smack these big meals.

We would switch back and forth between fishing under indicators and dry flies as the weather and wind would allow, and were into fish constantly. There were very few spots that Boitano had us work with our casts that didn’t produce a strike that would take our indicators down. We missed a bunch of fish and lost several. Boitano blamed the lost fish on the fact that we were using size 18 nymphs. I blamed it on being to slow to set the hook or being too heavy handed once they were hooked.

Boitano had his hands full getting us downstream. There were times that it took a lot of effort to pull against the upstream wind, and once the wind nearly blew us into the bank. These gusts were few, though, and we had enough sun and calm water to have very good success with the dry flies. This will only get better as temperatures warm. The Skwala hatches are just getting started and the March Browns will be out very soon. Once again I discovered that early spring fishing on the Yakima can be amazing. This river sees very heavy traffic through the summer, but people are missing out on some great fishing right now. We hooked at least 20 fish on the float, and probably missed as many, and we didn’t encounter another boat all day. If fishing the Yakima is something you’d like to learn more about, visit the Troutwater Fly Fishing web site at tightlinesangling.com or Facebook pages. Boitano and all the guys there are vey helpful and will give you latest reports on fishing conditions and the best patterns, too.

I got out on Lake Chelan last Saturday with my brother Rick and Eric Granstrom. Conditions were much better than I experienced the week before, when we were blown off the lake early. We had a slow start this time, though. We spotted a nice batch of fish just below Mill Bay, but when we put our gear down we couldn’t coax any to bite. We moved further down lake and started looking for fish off Peterson’s, where I usually do pretty good. Fish were still scarce, until we moved out into the middle of the lake. Then our luck changed. All of a sudden our rods started going off in rapid succession. We had doubles, triples and had nine fat kokanee in the cooler in no time.

Then, as it often does when kokanee fishing, it went dead. We trolled around for 40 minutes without a bump, and then it was on again. At one point all four rods went off and we landed all four of them! We needed to clean our fish and get home in time to watch Gonzaga play, so we quit when we had 16 fish in the box. Most of the fish were taken at 70 to 90 feet deep, with the really deep rods producing the best. We were using small trout dodgers with short leaders to small hoochies baited with white corn, scented of course. We kept our speed right about 1 mph. I had one fish on for a while that was taking some good runs. We never saw it though, as it broke my 13-pound leader! There were a lot of people out taking advantage of the early appearance of the kokanee in the lake. It should get better and better, and no one can believe that we are once again seeing such big kokanee at Chelan.

There are some more great fishing opportunities coming up very soon here in the region and you don’t want to delay getting your new license. It is going to get crowded at the local sporting goods stores as we approach April 1st, when new licenses are due. You’ll want to stock up on new trout gear to get ready for the opening of the lakes in the Columbia Basin. Fishing should be outstanding this year for the “April Fools” opener.

I want to remind everyone about the new derby at Banks Lakes on April 6th and 7th. The Triple Fish Challenge is a great way to test your skills at catching a variety of our most popular species here in Central Washington. The two-day derby will see who can catch the biggest and most rainbow, walleye and smallmouth bass on Banks Lake. The top prize is a 14-foot Achilles inflatable fishing boat and motor, and there are prizes each day for biggest fish of each specie and heaviest stringer in both adult and youth categories. To sign up, go to my web site and click on the Pepsi Calendar and follow the link to derby page.

Here comes spring fishing. Get your license and gear up to get out and go!

By Dave Graybill

FishingMagician.com