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....

fishinChristian

11/17/2012 4:04:00 PM

Sorry your maiden (or is it midden?) flight was so frustrating. It is an art, as any oldie will tell you. And boy do the details matter. Those little mouths can be very fussy. Those times you can't tell the bite from the rocks, sometimes lengthening the drop leader helps hook 'em, that or reducing the size of hook/fly. I've gone down as low as size 22 on river whitefish. You might like lake whitefish better though. You fish bait trout style, and they are much bigger. Maybe sometime we should try the river together, maybe with Jiggy or... But if the aforementioned 'oldie' was honest, he'd mention trips just like yours as well, cold, maybe wet, kinda miserable. The kind of trip where it would be better to stay home and read "A Fine and Pleasant Misery."

There's always panfish!

tluedeke

11/18/2012 10:43:00 AM

Now that I've had time to relax and analyze what went wrong, I *must* have had bites. I was using the same gear, and obviously the fish density was high. The decent guy that came by and gave me some hints had two fish on in the same spot I was fishing, using essentially the same gear.

The only conclusion is that I don't have the experience or rod type to pick up those subtle bites in the "rod noise" of bottom banging the river. That is all the twitching and jerking of the rod tip under the weight going off the bottom disguises the bites to a novice like me.

GordyC

11/18/2012 4:28:00 PM

As I tell my sister, anytime you think you have a bite, jerk. It's free.

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