I didn’t get to Banks for walleye as often as I had planned last week, due to the wind. I did get out one day, and as promised in my reports on various media, I will give you the results of that trip.

In spite of the forecast for a very stiff breeze I got my friend Dennis Beich to make the trip to Banks Lake last Friday. We put the boat in at the Million Dollar Mile. I should mention that this launch is very shallow and narrow, and boats, like my 20-foot Smoker Craft need to be cautious when putting in here. We started trolling as soon as I had 12 to 14 feet of water under us. We were using bottom walkers with spinners and nightcrawlers and the perch were pouncing on them. We moved to deeper water to avoid them and unfortunately, avoided the walleye as well. We pounded our way up to Barker Flats looking calmer water. We found the water much more calm, but no walleye. The water was flat near Steamboat Rock, too, where many boats were trolling. They had also found a place out of the wind. We got our baits picked a couple of times and actually put two small fish in the live well.

Finally, I decided to bang our way back down to the area just below Rosebush and put out some crank baits. Well, what do you know, we were getting into some fish. We put six walleye in the live well in the last hour. I had put on the deepest diving Flicker Shads, Bandits and a custom plug I got at Coulee Playland. The fish ranged in size from 14 inches to over 20 inches long. My original plan, if you read my report last Wednesday was to pull crank baits to begin with. I would have been better off doing just that. This week’s photo was taken on Banks last Friday.

My plan for last week was to make up for some lost time with a couple of trips to Banks Lake. Even though the forecast is for some wind I am going to give it a try anyway. My brother Rick and cousin Greg had been on Banks for a few days and had been having a ball. They were catching plenty of eaters and releasing some big fish. They had been trolling Flicker Shads and my plan was to do the same, either on side planers or straight out of the boat. If the wind was brisk we may not need to use planers, but that is fun, too. I was going to launch at the campground at the Million Dollar Mile and fish along the shore there. You can read or listen to my reports on how we did on Monday. You can now tune into the Podcast if you are out of range of the stations that carry my reports. Click the Podcast button my website to see how to do it. You can get the blow-by-blow by reading my weekly column in the Exchange newspapers, too.

I told my wife a week ago that it looked like it was going to be windy later that week, and if she would like to run up to Fish Lake. She said that when we passed through Cle Elem recently, and I had told her it was about the right time to fish the Teanaway River. She reminded me that there is a very short window when the fishing is just right, I had better do that. She was right. I drove up the next morning and found conditions very good for wading. I tried a Stone Fly with a Prince Nymph dropper, and only got one fish to hit it. I stopped at one of my favorite holes and changed my set up. I cast this across the current and let it be pulled under. WHAM! A fish hit my fly and ran upstream and then downstream and when I eased it into the shallows I saw it was a 15-inch cutthroat. It was fat, with beautiful red slashes on its throat. I slipped the hook out and watched it scoot away. That fish made my day!