Alright, so when we haven’t been attempting to fish for flounder lately, we’ve been researching for our upcoming spring break vacation to beautiful Florence, Oregon (to be said in the voice of Bob Barker on the Price is Right).
We won’t actually be in the town of Florence (except for libations) as we’ve acquired a small vacation rental with the family on Munsel Lake. If you read my prior post about Tippy and the bass, this is the reason we’ve been beefing her up with seats, oars, etc. We will be spending almost 5 days here exploring a lake we have never fished. Coastal lakes tend to have very similar traits while also having their own unique characteristics. We’re hoping that we’ll have it all figured out by day five, which is usually how that works. Year round the lake is supposed to hold yellow perch, cutthroat trout, and largemouth bass as well as annual stocking of rainbow trout. We all (as a family) agreed on this lake for these reasons. The variety will keep us busy for the week, but if we bomb out on the resident species at least we can all drink beer and rail on some stockers. I heard a guy call them “catchables” the other day. Ponder that for awhile. I think he meant keepables which is even funnier.
Anyway, as you can see the deepest point of the lake is 25.5 meters (or about 83.5 feet for everyone that will ever read this blog), with the shallowest points between 0 and 4 meters (13 ft). Seems to be slow sloping depth so the bass areas should be fairly evident. Of course since they are the weirdest and most out of our depth or range with the fly rod, we’re going to need to catch some yellow perch. We dig weird fish. From what I can get on the internet, they live in fairly deep weedy water. All of this info is coming from middle America so I’ll try to report on that more if we consistently catch them in certain areas and on certain flies.
So there’s the foreshadowing for the next post.
With the excitement of a vacation looming we have been in the tying cave for hours and even days trying to cover all of our bases. We are bringing EVERYTHING. The main staples that we know for the stocker trout are small black leeches with an orange bead. From what I’ve read the yellow perch like chartreuse so there’ll be a bit of that. Bass are just assholes this time of year so we’re bringing topwater poppers, articulated things, crawdad patterns, you name it. I think we’re even bringing the crawdad traps, though it’s way too early. You never know. Those are for us, not the bass though (yum).
These are the stocker flies. The orange bead black leeches are particularly good everywhere we go to the point that we just call them “The Lake Fly.” There are a few chartreuse and sparklies in there for the yellow perch. Only two of the pink bead peacock leeches so they’ll probably crush them. So those are the hunter patterns.
My real hope for the stockers is that they have settled down enough that when we get a hatch, they’ll rise. The Oregon coast is not exactly dry fly heaven, and though there are steelhead, salmon, and cutthroat (who’ll rise on occasion), we just don’t get that eastern of the cascades rise. What we’re going to see for a hatch is midges, which will probably be bigger than you’d think to pack for. So here’s the midge box....Big and small and just blurry enough so that no one can see them (not intentional, my camera makes me murderous), I think we’re probably going to be okay there.
At this point, the only thing we’re missing for this adventure is an actual motor. For now we’re tethered to battery power, but I feel pretty good about it as the lake is only 110 acres. We happen to have two batteries (thank you to our good buddy guide friend for letting us use one of his).
Oh, on a side note, while we have been holed up in here tying we’ve been listening to the relatively new Open Fly podcasts which you can check out at theopenflypodcast.com. These guys a pretty dry funny and the guests that they have on the show can be unintentionally hilarious. They do talk about some serious conservation issues, but in a light way that keeps you from just breaking all of your fly rods over your knee. If you have time to sit and listen for two hours at a time, give them a look.
No comments:
Post a Comment