Report is a couple days late but oh well.

Decided to head to Blackman's Lake in Snohomish after a frustrating day of fishing at Silver Lake the previous day; between being defecated upon by a "coordinated airstrike" of the local birds and dealing with a literally impossible mess of tangled fly line, I left fishless and covered in bird droppings. Yay. Does anyone know if Cormorant tastes good?

Blackman's lake was rather murky amidst days of high winds, so getting a wily trout's attention was a little harder than usual. I brought no real trolling gear, and a lack of surface activity had me guessing for the majority of the day. 5 hours in the boat, casting all manner of Buggers on the fly and spinners, spoons, and flatfish on ultralight spinning tackle, and not even a bite to show for it. I decided to call it a day around 12:00, so I headed back to the park and beached my pontoon.

Splash. Swirl. Suddenly there were fish jumping five to ten feet from the shore. What the heck these trout were doing this shallow, who knows. There must have been an abundance of food, or perhaps the stained water had confused them. Anyway, I decided to pursue these little rascals from the shore instead, leaving my pontoon half in the water. Immediately my lure selection paid off in an unexpected way. I had seen lots of little fish about, you know, stocker trout and the like, but something bigger was lurking.....

Whap- it hit like a truck, and my lure stopped dead in its track. Head shakes, drag-peeling runs and three minutes of splashing about resulted in a beautiful rainbow trout, probably a triploid or bonus jumbo fish. Very nice, beautiful colors, very unexpected! Catch and release let the beast swim another day.

Over the course of the next two to three hours, I landed three more trout and got several more strikes. They were all of average size and were likewise released.

The general consensus on the day was pretty tough fishing for everyone; nobody really seemed to have got a consistent pattern going. Sure, there was a decent amount caught, most of the one I saw were from trolling. But for a day off, there is almost no way I would've rather spent it.

Tight lines!

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