My buddy and an old family friend, Ed Stanley, was in town this past week. As planned, he and his friend from down south, Steve Ficovich, joined me for a couple of days of chasing after some bigger trout. Steve is the head golf pro at Wente Vineyards C.C. in California and had flown up for two days to sample some of Central Oregon's premier trophy trout fishing.

As luck would have it, a big front was pushing on in for Monday with colder temps, moderately higher winds, and a 70 % chance of rain on Tuesday. This is not what we wanted, especially the wind. I picked them up at 5 a.m. and we made the 45 minute run up Newberry Crater to East Lake. When we left Bend, the temp was 39 degrees. I knew it was getting a little ugly when I experienced some ice about two miles below the crater. By the time we got to East, the wind had picked up to a steady 20 m.p.h. and the temp on the truck mirror said 23 degrees. This is June 11 mind you.....not your typical summer morning. There was some light snow starting to blow and that kind of made it easy to change our fishing plans.

I had recently received a report from someone who corresponds with me via the website that LBC went off well for he and his son and they had caught 11 bulls up to 14 LB. just this past weekend. With that in mind, we took a vote and made the long trek to Billy to see if we could get some action on the bulls. I decided to take the road all the way to Perry South to avoid the long boat ride into the the West wind that was blowing up the Metolius Arm this morning. When we finally got on the water, it was 9:30 a.m. As luck would have it, Steve drew the first up and got into a 10 LB. bull within the first five minutes. Not 10 minutes later Ed takes his turn on a 16 in. bull. That was the end of that as we had a couple of short strikes and one hapless smallmouth before the wind drove us off.

The next day found us on the way to Wickiup only to find out that the main ramp is closed and under repair. That left the Gull Point campground ramp as the only option. With the lake this high, it is so shallow that we passed with the forecast of high winds developing later in the day. Once again we were on our way to East and what a difference a day makes! It was nice and sunny with a light breeze. As soon as we got out, we caught a smaller 16-17 in. brown almost immediately. 10 more browns to 5 LB. made it to the boat before we got off around 3:00 p.m. We did release the biggest one after some photos. He was a short but fat male of unusually beautiful color. One of the 3 LB. browns we kept had a 5 in. rainbow and a 3 in. chub in its gut. They were fairly intact.

I will probably be out next week to chase the browns again......drop back to the site to see what develops.

Tight Lines,
Rick