Monday 1 September 2008

It's Boatman Time

I got two phone calls from my buddies last night. Chuck Harvey and Phil Rowley called me up and asked if I'm in for some fishin' at Muir. Uh, no I'm done fishing for the season... CHA! I'll see you there at 10am Monday morning. So when I got there this morning and backed my vehicle down to the water to set up my 'toon I see this big burnt mess right at the launch. Phil comes down to the water and points out a rock where a molotov cocktail had been thrown against it. If you look close at the pic, you can see the broken bottle with the burnt rag. What is wrong with people? First there are no fires aloud there never mind right where folks launch their boats and second, why the hell are they throwing fire bombs? To top it off, whatever they were burning in the fire had a shit load of nails in it. I cleaned up most of the broken glass both from the fire and the molotov cocktail and cleaned up a lot of nails. I was going to finish picking up the rest when I came back in but someone beat me to it.

Just before I headed out onto the water, I noticed the dock and the lack of water under it. I've never seen the table this low at Muir before. If you look close enough, you can actually see that the end of the dock isn't even touching the water. I hope we get a lot of snow this winter to bring the levels back up.

I headed out onto the water at about 11am, Chuck had showed up earlier and was on the water already and Phil had got out just before me. We headed over to the south side of the island and parked ourselves in our usual spot which didn't really produce for us so after a while we all split up. Chuck -who had caught a 24 incher before we arrived- (see pic below) started trolling around the lake, Phil headed over to the south shoreline with his two sons and I went north-east to the flats. After I dropped my anchor, I set up with a small boatman on the point with a bloodworm (Redd October) dropper. I was fishing in about 9-10ft of water and I set my indicator so it would present my dropper one foot off the bottom. On the first cast I hooked into a nice one and... Dam! He got off. I reset the indicator and on my second cast the indicator goes under again. I set the hook and play the fish for about 3 minutes when it dives for the weeds and... Snap! Another nice one gone. I setup again this time with 6lb vanish as my tippet a chironomid on the point. I set my indicator, cast out, wait a couple minutes and I'm hooked up again. The trout is jumping like crazy and... spits the hook. Oh, I'm choked now. I cast out again for the fourth time now, strip, wait, strip, wait and... nothing? Hmmm. Cast out again. Strip, wait... the indicator goes under and a 24 inch rainbow is leaping out of the water over and over again. I'm sure I'm gonna loose this one too but after fighting him hard I finally get him in. I take a quick pic, pump the throat to find eight boatman and two stickleback minnows. I then let him swim away on his own steam and wouldn't you know it, my biggest Muir Lake bow to date and the pic didn't turn out. I caught three more in the flats after Chuck and Phil made their way over. And then one more on the north-west side of the island using boatman patterns. All trout were between 19 and 24 inches. Wasn't a banner day by any means but a whole lot of fun with good company.

1 comment:

James Mann said...

It really saddens me to see what people do to entertain themselves. They don't seem to care what happens to our environment or what others think of their actions.

We usually have a water shortage through August but this year we almost had a record rain fall for August which for a change raised the water table.

This has been the best year in decades for Atlantic salmon runs, they are returning in large numbers, even to rivers they have not been to in years.

When the water gets that low here it usually means we need to find the fish in new places.