by The Troutist, August 30, 2013

Another year has come and gone for me as I celebrated my birthday with a nice afternoon nap. Yes that’s right life in the fast lane. I remember the days when I would wake up and take inventory of my body to make sure all my parts were still there and everything was still in working order. Now days my parts all let me know they are still there and sometimes they all function together. To be quite honest I am surprised that I am still here after all the self inflicted abuse I put my body through as young buck. My hair has gotten a little thinner on top and I said if it goes bald I will just shave my head. My friends have already picked out a new name for me “Bullet Head”; I believe they are implying that I have a pointed head. I guess that’s better than being called “Pin Head”, so I think there is a positive in there somewhere. Well enough of this nonsense let’s get into last weekend’s fishing adventure.

With the forecast calling for some showers and wind Brett and I decided that Saturday we should stay close to home. Lost Lake was our destination, we both knew that the water would be in the 70’s but we were hoping we could entice enough trout to slam our flies that it would at least be interesting. Well we were wrong trout angling was tough at best. We worked the shallower south end of the lake for the first hour and had nothing to show for it except one bass about 2 pounds and quite a few smaller ones. Our next move was to work the north end where the water reaches depths of 50’. We worked it hard and soon found out that once again it was a bass show. We found that the trout were running at 20’ and deeper and the bass were 20’ and shallower. After returning to the south end we did manage to hook and release 3-rainbow and lost another at the boat.

Brett had the big bass of the day weighing in at around 2 ½ pounds. We were trying to find any color combination of a fly and smile blade they would not hit, we didn’t find one. For you bass guys I would make an effort to hit this Mason County lake. You don’t really have to work the docks all that much just stay in the shallower water like I stated before and I thing you will be pleasantly surprised.

On our way home we stopped in to see our friends at Verle’s tackle shop. Both of us always enjoy our stops there to see our old friends and replenish or angling supplies. Now I’m not saying that they cater to us but they always have the flies and smile blades that we use the most. We were headed to Mayfield Lake the next day and I wanted to try something a little different. I knew they carried the .08 Chartreuse Smile Blade and a #6 green Carey Specials.



Brett and I were on the road at 0’dark early in hopes of a much more productive day than we had on Saturday. We were on the lake by 7:30am and blasted down to the shores of the State Park. We started our trolling patterns in 20’ of water and continued working our way into deeper water when the bite would die out. Next was 30’-40’-50’, all of these depths produced an abundance of feisty rainbow trout all ranging in size from 11-14 inches. As the sun started moving over head and the bite would die we just moved out into a little deeper water. I figure our trolling depth ranged from 4-12 feet.

We put a little time in on this lake about once a week for the past three to four weeks and it really paid off. After narrowing everything down we had discovered the secret and it was time to be rewarded with numbers that we are used to. At the end of the day we had hooked and released 62 of these great fighting and hard hitting rainbow trout. What amazed me was that we were the only ones working the lake until about 9am. We were off the water by 1pm and headed for our first traffic jam on I-5 by 1:30pm.

This has become one of my favorite late summer lakes by far. If you have never worked this water I strongly recommend it. Just keep in mind that 1pm seems to be the witching hour for all the speed demons that like to stir the water up. Well that’s about it for this column I have got to hit the rack, hopefully get some sleep so I can get down south to the Columbia River and do some battle with some Chinook Salmon. As always I will post photos on my Uncle Wes face book page.

So until next time may your next trout be your trophy mount.
The Troutist-“Uncle Wes” Malmberg.




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