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This report covers 3 days at Lake Roosevelt 5/10 - 5/13. We arrived late morning and had a nice visit with our hosts followed by lunch then headed for the launch. Clear skies, sunny, hot, and rising reservoir levels combined to make for tough trout fishing, but we sure tried. Friday resulted in a nice boat ride, no fish to clean, prime rib dinner at Two Rivers casino, before heading back and turning in.

Saturday we started out earlier than our usual time, and were on the water at 7am heading downstream. We fished the same area as the week before, and though we had a couple strikes, and one nice native rainbow which I released in the water at the boat, we did not put anything in the cooler. By late morning outside temps were approaching 80° and the sun was really bright. We left the San Poil and headed out to fish above Keller Ferry. Spent 2 hrs there and not a bite, so upstream we went and spent another couple hours fishing near Whitestone again with no luck. We finished the day in the area of Sterling Point with the same result, so we pulled gear and headed back to Seven Bays in time for our 6pm dinner date.

After dinner our wives visited while my host and I headed to the bank for some walleye shore fishing. I put 2 nice ones (2lbs & 2lbs 14ozs) on the stringer within 15 minutes, and both came on back to back casts. My host hooked up with an even better one that went 4lbs even. It was almost dark by then, so we made the trek back up the hill while there was still enough light to see.

Sunday turned out to be a repeat of the previous day's fishing for us even though we were seeing fish jump where we were trolling. After 4hrs of working normally productive spots, I pulled gear and we called it a weekend.

Air temps were very warm for early May, with daytime highs of 89° Friday and Saturday. Sunday started a little cooler due to cloud cover, but started to warm up quickly when it finally started to burn off. It was almost 80° when we pulled gear at noon.

Water surface temps ranged from 55.9° - 63.4° for the three days. I tried trolling on the surface, subsurface, and off downriggers, flies, plugs, spinners, with and without dodgers, from 15' - 35' but nothing seemed to work. Kokanee target temp of 54° was right at 30' per my FishHawk TD, but knowing didn't seem to help.

Reservoir level was 1254.4' Friday, 1254.7' @ 7am and 1255.2 @ 5pm Saturday, and 1256.2' when we launched Sunday morning at 7am. Dock hadn't been pulled up so we had to wade through a foot of water to launch the boat. Level was 1256.5' when we returned to the dock, which had been pulled up so we didn't have to wade to recover.

We saw an abundance of wildlife bighorn sheep 2 of the three days including ewes with fuzzball lambs, deer, quail, and several eagles. Quite an enjoyable weekend and my wife can't think of a better way to spend Mother's Day weekend than on the water fishing, viewing wildlife, or napping. :-)

Augwen

5/14/2013 10:50:00 AM

Sounds like a nice time...other than the fishing!!

downriggeral

5/14/2013 4:17:00 PM

I always appreciate your posts. We fished down there the week before for kokanee and got 5 nice trout. You fished for trout and got kokanee....go figure! I am convinced the rising water is not the fisherman's best friend.
Tight lines - AH

widebear

5/14/2013 8:07:00 PM

First time on this sight so I am not sure exactly how to comment. But the wife and I launched at Lincoln around 8:30 on Sat. and we had a tough time also. I had to go to the old fashion way of fishing and picked up 2 nice Bow's and had a couple other hits. One across from Whitestone and the other at what we've called Haystack Rock for forty years. Or up river from the Goat Farm at the first rock out cropping. Both fish were very close to shore or rocks using a needle fish and a wicked willy going about 3.5 mph 230' behind the boat at 10' down on the riggger. This is the way we used to fish back in the late 60's and 70's.

hewesfisher

5/15/2013 6:31:00 AM

One thing I forgot to mention in my report was trolling speed, everything from 1.4 - 3.0 mph. Rising water at Roosevelt is never a good thing, and bright, sunny, calm conditions are my personal nemesis there. I'm sure that's more psychological than anything, but combined with rising water, definitely two big strikes against me. We usually make weekend plans like this weeks in advance so have to take the weather/water conditions as they are and make the best of them. No matter what, we always have a nice boat ride. :-)

Widebear - Sorry to hear you found conditions tough too, but at least they were consistent with what we found.

Al - No one was more surprised than I was regarding last week's take, and when I try to specifically target kokanee, I catch rainbow, so you got it right, go figure. LOL.

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