Hello all,
Had a much better day on the water Saturday from the last Saturday. I launched at fort spokane around 9:30am, left the dock with a horde of other anglers, there had to be about 20 boats either coming in or going out. For some reason I thought it was a good idea to drag my boat out from Medical Lake with my two wheel drive car because the weather man thought it was going to be above freezing for awhile on saturday. At any rate I got to the launch and immediately started to worry about the conditions. The launch itself had to have at least a solid 1/8" of ice on the northern half all the way down to the water, guys in trucks didn't seem to have too many problems but if I ran to it with the car I would have been in a world of hurt. Be careful out there in the mornings, bring some ice melt or chains just in case it gets pretty slick apparently. One of the piers is also broken and half way sunk into the water now, so you need some tall boots or a pair of waders to effectively cross it, it felt good though still strong enough to hold weight.
After launching I ran straigt out to the two rivers point to target walleyes, according to everyone's responses to my previous post, I went with a larger 5/8 oz hot pink ball head jig with a full crawler trailer, and set up outside of some other guys that where at the confluence and worked my way in towards the point marker from 50' of water to about 25' soft jigging on a very slow back troll. In about 27' of water I set into a monster, felt like a great fish but in my haste to catch my first ever Washington state walleye I went ahead and set to fast and had him on for only a minute until he grabbed to worm and sent my jig back up to me. So I worked the 27' feet of water line for he remainder of the day. I saw a few other anglers pull in good eater males for most of the morning working the break on the lake side of the point. As the day started to slow down I moved into the lake side of the point and started to slow back troll into the point again from the opposite side.
At this point it was about 11:00am and the water temp at the confluence of the spokane was about 37 F, and the water clarity had vastly improved from last week almost doubling in visability. So I went to a smaller ball jighead 3/8 oz this time in chartuse with the same trailing crawler set up. Bottom bouncing into the shallow water trying to keep the current and trolling motor on the same tilt to keep the line vertical. I hooked into a small male around 12 inches and tossed him back thinking it was going to be a good day and wanted to get a few 15 inchers to make the fillet time worth it (always a mistake) I worked the point again until all the other anglers made a much wiser descision and took off from the dead spot. After fishing it alone for about 20 minutes I decided to cruise up north to see if I could start finding some other spots to try. I saw a few boats around the first red buoy past the cove on the east side of the lake and saw a few guys land some bows trolling at about 1.5 mphs, so I put a bottom walker with a worm harness on and tried my luck, failing miserably in the process. I went a little more north and hit a few more coves looking to mark fish on the finder and didn't really see any so I went back to the two rivers point at about 1:20pm. I set up the same with the same jig and crawler rig and landed a 14" eye and kept at it till about 2:30pm or so.
Because I was so worried about the launch getting more ice on it and seeing myself stuck on LR for the night because I didn't bring the truck or any ice melt, I thought it wise to head back to the launch and take off, otherwise I would have stayed out there for quite awhile. The lake was like glass and the fishing is improving, for walleye anyways, and it was bright sunny and all around a good trip. On the way back through the middle of the spokane river I was marking a lot of fish on the bottom in 180 feet of water, it seemed almost every 10 feet or so I would mark a fish at 2 foot off the bottom. Not to sure what they might be, but I don't really have the gear for fishing in 180 feet so I let em off the hook this time.

Tight lines and heavy nets,
Fowl

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