I spent a couple of days fishing for trout and walleye on Rufus Woods last week. I needed to get some fish for the smoker. I have some other favorite places to go when the weather gets cold.

In the late fall you can often find me on Lake Roosevelt or Rufus Woods Reservoir, fishing for trout. Lake Roosevelt is planted with triploid rainbow trout every year, and some years as many as 700,000 are released. They are raised in net pens all along the reservoir, and I know the fishing is good from Kettle Falls downstream to Grand Coulee Dam.
I got a call on Monday morning from Jim Payne, who was fishing at Sterling Point, near Seven Bays.  While we were on the phone he landed a clipped rainbow that measured 21 inches and weighed just over 3 pounds. He had been fishing the area for four days and limited every day. I have had great success fishing from the shore at Spring Canyon and Keller and look forward to that later this year. My next planned trip is to Rufus Woods Reservoir. I will be launching from the Colville Net Pens site, as I have the annual Access Permit and will pay the launch fee at that booth when I enter. A tribal license is not required here. It shouldn’t take too long to get our two-fish limits of triploid rainbow trout weighing from 3 to 6 pounds.

I had completely exhausted my supply of smoked fish in my freezer. That’s a sad state of affairs. To correct this, I invited my brother in-law Tom Verschuren to take a trip to Rufus Woods. There is no better product to come out of a smoker than smoked triploid. We drove up in time to fish for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon at the middle net pens. When we arrived, we saw a bank angler land a fish. That was a good sign. Even better was Tom getting a fish on his first cast. The trout hit his Power Bait on the way down. However, the apparent good bite failed us. One issue was the very heavy current. We had to add weight to get our baits to stick to the bottom and sometimes our bait was even washed off. Another issue that I haven’t run into before was that our baits were often covered with weeds when we reeled in to check them. The water temperature has cooled down enough to kill the weeds and they are floating down and fouling up our efforts to fish on the bottom.

We made the run up to the upper net pens and Tom got another fish. We had discovered that the Berkley Power Bait Nuggets, which look suspiciously like the pellets they feed the fish in net pens was what the trout preferred. We stuck it out until it was getting dark and at the last minute I finally landed a fish before we called it day. That gave us a total of three triploids for the afternoon.

After fishing the afternoon on Rufus Woods, Tom and I spent the night in Grand Coulee at the Grand Coulee Center Lodge. I like staying here as the rooms are nice and they have outside outlets so you can charge your bow mount motor overnight. When you make your room reservation, let them know you are bringing your boat. They will save a space for you near the outlets.

When we got up we were surprised how cold it was. Everything had a thick coating of frost, but most of it was gone by the time we arrived at the Net Pens launch site. We were having about the same kind of luck catching trout as we did the day before, which means it wasn’t great. We got a fish in the first twenty minutes, but after another hour it was time to move.

We fished near the upper pens and found the fishing slow here, too. I decided to troll downstream with bottom bouncers to see if could hook a walleye and we usually get triploids while we are doing this. We had several bites without hooking up, but I finally set the hook on something. Turned out to be a big whitefish.  I kept this as I always wanted to try one as they are very abundant on Banks Lake. We ran back down to the middle pens and Tom landed the best triploid of the trip. We gave this area some more time but at about 2 p.m. we reeled in our gear and headed home. This week’s photo is of Tom with a triploid he caught on the second day of our trip.

On Saturday morning I tried the whitefish. I filleted the fish the same way I would a walleye. There are a row of large pin bones in the fillets, and I carefully sliced these out. I put the fillets in a pan with just butter and only added salt and pepper to get a good sample of the flavor. My wife and I agreed that this was good fish, and she immediately thought of a recipe to use the next time we had some. I am going to try to get more of these whitefish this winter on Banks Lake.

When I was entering Dan’s Market in Leavenworth the other day I noticed a flyer on the bulletin board. It was announcing an event provided by the Upper Columbia United Tribes called “Salmon: Showing Us the Way Home”, presented by Dr. Michel on November 14th, at 7 p.m. The program will be about the collaborative efforts to return salmon to their historic habitats of the upper Columbia River. Many of you may be aware of the releases of Chinook salmon by the Colville Tribe into the Columbia above Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams. Adult Chinook were tagged and followed to see how they would adapt to this new environment. Methods to allow for the passage of salmon above these two dams have been explored. This program would be of interest to all of those who would like to learn about the possibility of restoring salmon returns to the Columbia River above these dams. This is a Zoom program and the best way I have found to register and get a reminder about the event is to go the Wenatchee River Institute and click on the Calendar. This will lead you to a form to get you signed up.