My middle grandson, Alec, has been vacationing with us for the past few weeks. Both he and the oldest one, Colin, usually come for several weeks each summer and it is my pleasure to spoil them rotten with fishing, camping, shooting, golf and anything else we can think up.

When Alec arrived this June, I asked him what he wanted to accomplish as far as "fishing goals" go. Of course, being my grandson, he is enamored with the thought of catching a 10 Lb. brown. He thought about it a bit and said " How about a 20 Lb. lake trout and a 10 LB. brown." He became interested in the lake trout, I think, because Colin caught a 20 LB.+ laker last year. I told him that I would have to shake the dust off my laker drill but we could give it a go. The brown is much harder to accomplish but we fish hard and someday, I think I will be able to put him on one. Of course there are no guarantees!

For the final leg of his Oregon vacation this year, we planned on heading up to Crescent Lake for part of a week. There is a good chance for a nice brown and the lake can produce some big lake trout as well. We decided on pulling up the trailer and boat and grandma was coming along to enjoy the good weather that was predicted. I was surprised at the lack of campers for this time of year. My guess is that high gas prices are having an impact. I'm not complaining as we had our choice of sites.

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The plan was to work for browns early and switch to lakers as the sun got up. Same thing in reverse for the evening........lakers early and browns at last light. The first night we got on the board with a nice 4 LB. brown right before dark and one other good take down. The next morning brought us several small lakers up to around 8 LB. while working for browns. That evening, Alec stuck what would turn out to be his best brown of the trip. The brown fought hard and we were hoping this would be the one......10 LB! It was a nice hen that weighed in at 7 LB.

It was tough for the browns but we did mange to scratch out a few each day. The best browns went 4, 5.5 and 7 LB. The laker bite turned out to be better than I thought. They seem to be in transition and are not that deep yet and we caught many right around 50 feet. The best of our lakers went 10, 12, 14, 17 and 20 LB.+ Most were caught on Lymans and a B-16 custom painted Bomber that resembles a kokanee. We were working structure in various parts of the lake with downriggers and had a ball getting into the big char at depths that we didn't have to worry about their swim bladders blowing up. Seems like conditions are 4-6 weeks behind schedule so far this year. I would have expected to find a lot of them at 100-150 feet but we didn't graph many at those depths. When we could locate them we caught them......we even had a double one evening with the 12 and 14 coming within seconds of each other. If we hadn't been pursuing the browns, we could have caught a lot more lakers. After we got him the 20 LB. laker, we backed off and worked more diligently for browns.

I feel we got pretty lucky to meet one of his goals. I knew that the 10 LB. brown would be the hard, but to catch a 7 LB. brown and a 20 LB. laker on the same trip.....we weren't too far off.

Look for some more brown trout action as I meet up with Lance Fisher, from the Portland FM station 95.5, on East Lake in mid July and hook up with the "Da Vin Man" the same week.

Tight lines,
Rick