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ArcticAmoeba
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I took the pontoons out to Detroit Lake for the day Saturday, and ended up just spending the night...Because the Santiam was barfing trout from her drifts. The Kokanee fishing on the part of the lake that we fished was pretty good. The ramp @ Blowout road, or Hoover campground. It is where the mout of the cold Santiam meets the warmer 70 degree Detroit Lake. Kokanee were in roughly 45 feet of water at the mouth, and were taking your standard green wedding ring, and Ford fender rigs. All mid sized fish, and didnot keep any. Let 'em get big for next year. But we were mostly fishing on private property up above Idanha. It was really cool to drift fish for trout, which is something I have never really done...Mostly flies on rivers for me, which by the way I only casted 10 or so times, because it would have been unfair to my friend, and his dad if I caught 100 trout in an hour! So i switched over to a spinning setup and threw a #3 with black bell body, blackened brass blade, and some deadly sharp Owner, or maybe VMC trebs. Scoped the different areas where I would target Steelhead and started learning the drifts. Once I found where the bottom, and the big snags were, it only took a couple more casts to start bringing them in at a ratio of one fish for every 2.32 casts. I had moments where I went like 5 for 5, and others where I took 7 blank casts. After about 25 released, and 2 retained, I switched to drifting the last of my homebrew trout dough. All I had were some size 1 VMC's with 10 lb bait loop leaders, so I said, MEH! and went with it, withsome real fat chunks of dough. This was real nice as it is exactly how I fish the Clackamas. Drift good bait. My bread and butter paid off, ended up hookin upu with close to 2 dozen more, and keeping 2 more 14 inchers. By this time I had cooked trout for breakfast over the campfire, and now it was lunch time, so 1 more goes on, and I hit the evening bite for more action, and one more fatty to make it 3 for dinner. This was my best trout day ever. Nothing come very close actually, and I attribute this success to being persistent in absoluetly nailing the drift I was fishing, and not fishing it for more than a half hour. For a while my buddy was in every spot I just left, and he went on a real dead streak, but both my friends, and one of their dads all got into fish, about 10-12 apiece. So excellent fishing on the Santiam in this one strecth that is roughly 1/2 mile long, that is why we only fished Detroit for 3 hours in the afternoon for Kokanee. So here is a picture of a couple of the real murderer drifts. You can probably spot them in 1 or 2 pictures. and a picture of the breakfast trout. Once again camera ran out of battery, so i could not take more, but at least the scenery pics are nice. MMMM. Very nice area. Great fishery, and great friends...Doesn't get much better than that!
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) on the second day in the hour just before dawn, with a borrowed 4 wt. fly rod. Didn't seem to matter what fly was on. Minus the big wets for some reason... But the fly did need to be placed and mega mended to keep it in the seam of the drift, where the trout were hitting surface lures. They nailed PowerBait on a Spiderman rod with 4 lb. Spectra! The kid was just casting where ever, and the fish hit the fat glob of PowerBait. I did tactically drift my own stink dough, but I bet willy nilly casts of the stuff woud have produced. So if you can get out to Detroit or Idanha ladies & gentlemen, do it. Easy drive, and pretty predictable fishing in the lake, and real spurts of excellent days, with rare skunk sessions on the river. Even below the dam at Minto, a few guys had full stringers of probably 16-18" Rinbows. Trophies for the Santiam I guess, and they had full limits by 9:30 A.M. when I stopped to drop a line in on the trip home. Fishin is good out East of the I-5 cooridor.
oh well always next saturday right...
ray:
