Lake Roosevelt is the place to go for anglers who want to get some very big kokanee and really good catches of rainbow trout. I was able to fish the big reservoir twice this week. I fished from the shore at Keller, and spent a short time trolling with Austin Moser below Spring Canyon.

The weather forecast for last Saturday was for very high winds. I had a trip planned with Austin Moser, who has been getting limits of big kokanee for his clients, and in spite of the forecast drove up to Keller. I got a text from Austin just before I got there saying it was probably too windy to fish. I had what I needed to fish from shore at Keller in the truck, so I headed down to the beach and put two rods out. I hadn’t been fishing for 15 minutes when I got a text from Austin saying that the water was flat at Crescent Bay, which is just below Spring Canyon, and to come on down. When I reeled in my lines, one of the rods had a nice 14-inch rainbow on it!

There is a launch at Crescent Bay, which is right above the dam just below the town of Grand Coulee. When the reservoir is drawn down in the winter it is high and dry, but it is still usable now, and that’s where Austin picked me up. He and his friend Ryan ran out the six lines on a new system that Austin has just started using. He puts out a big, wooden side planer and then attaches the line to the planer board tether with a sort of shower rod and small rigger clip. When the fish hits it pulls the line off the clip, so you don’t have anything but the line to reel in. You don’t have to reel up a planer and take it off as with his old system. You don’t have to pull the planer board in either. Just attach another release and send it out. Pretty cool. This is the way my brother Rick at Hooked on Toys has been fishing for years and it works great.

Austin put out a variety of gear to see what the kokanee would want that day. I put one of the new Kokabow Copper Series blades, the one called the Inferno, which is orange and copper on the front and copper on the back. The wind had come up, so we were in a hurry to get the lines out and I just tied a Ravisher spinner on right out of the package. Instead of the usual 16-inches that I use for leader length, this spinner was 24 inches behind the blade. We got all the rods out and Austin began fighting the wind to control his boat speed. He had run up the reservoir a ways from the launch so he could drive into the wind because with the wind behind us we would be going too fast. We just got settled into our troll when one of the lines popped out of the release. When we got it to the boat and in the net we saw that a 19-inch kokanee had hit the new Kokabow Copper Series blade and Ravisher spinner. Check out the photo in this week’s column.

Although we fished for another hour or so the wind got even worse and it was darn near impossible to control the boat speed. Austin did an amazing job in spite of it, but I had a nice fish for dinner and some good photos, so we headed for the launch. I really want to thank Austin for getting me out on the water. He felt bad that I had driven all the way up there from Leavenworth and it was super nice of him to get me out fishing.

I had been to Keller just the day before. I had never fished from the shore here and I talked my brother in-law, Tom Verschueren, into coming with me to try it out. I took a road from the boat launch that led us down the reservoir a short ways, and I found several turnouts, some even had picnic tables. We picked one that was very close to the water and set out our rods. Once they were in the water, I walked up to the truck to get something and Tom started yelling. I looked at one of my rods and saw it tipping forward so much that the rod was almost vertical. If Tom hadn’t grabbed this rod it would have gone into the water.

We were using our favorite shrimp and marshmallow baits on a slip sinker rig and were casting out as far as we could on the shallow sloping beach. We started at about 9 and by 1:30 we had ten rainbow on our stringer. They measured from 16 inches to 21 inches long. We got our baits stolen several times, broke off on the bottom a couple of times and released one wild red band rainbow.

Got an e-mail last week from Kevin Brown who had found a Sage fly rod made by Bill McGuire. He wanted to learn more about it, and he was pretty sure I could tell him about this “Wonder Rod” that Bill had made. When I called him, it took just a couple of minutes for us to realize that this was the rod that McGuire had made for me and I had left at the takeout on the Deschutes River over two years ago! He had found it at the Goodwill Store in The Dalles. Rather than ship the rod to me we agreed to meet when I am traveling to meetings and I will be near his home in Battleground, Washington. I can’t tell you how sick I was when I realized I had lost this rod. Bill McGuire was a dear friend, who had passed away, I had caught everything from bonefish in Belize to steelhead on the Methow with this rod. Kevin Brown is a special person who knew that this rod was unique and is thrilled to get it back to me.

I had a terrific week. I’m going to get my rod back, we caught some dandy rainbow out of Keller from shore and a big kokanee trolling with Austin. Fishing on Roosevelt is spectacular. Get out and give it a try!