What an amazing waste of a morning. Went up to the bars down below Vernita. Quite a few fisherman, probably 25. Used pink and red egg patterns, tipped with those fake maggots baits, on a leader ~15" above an ounce and a half of slinky weight. Found a couple of great spots, where current would have sent fish eggs down into the main Columbia channel.

Four and a half hours, and not one bite. Folks were leaving with stringers of fish. One helpful guy stopped by to chat with me (probably because I was getting frustrated and starting to cuss), and had two fish on within five casts in the same spot I'd been fishing. He'd gone in the exact same time as me, used more or less the same rig as me, did the same bouncing the bottom as me, and had five fish on the bank in an hour immediately upstream.

I have no idea how you are supposed to differentiate a bite on a fish species that bites super light, when you have heavy gear banging off the bottom in current. The rod tip is jerking and twitching all the time, and it is (to me) utterly the same as a fish bite.

Fishing for whitefish sucks. Eagerly looking forward to *never* doing that again....