Wednesday, December 19

Eric Granstrom and I hit the road last Saturday and headed up the Columbia looking for steelhead.

We made out first stop at Chelan Falls. We tried to fish the hatchery outlet stream area, and down to the bridge.

The water was higher than I had ever seen it here.

It is typically ankle deep at the stream mouth, but we were up to our knees in water.

There is a point below here, just above the bridge that I planned for us to stand on to make some casts, and the water was so high that it was mostly under water and we were up to our knees again.

We gave this up and made our way further up stream and fished from the bar below Wells Dam.

I felt good about the drift our bobbers and jigs were getting here, but the fish didn't seem to notice. We each just got one hit, but didn't hook up.

I talked to Jeff Stroup, who was checking fish here, and he said that one boat came in with just one hatchery fish for their efforts.

I know that there are steelhead here and want to get back there and fish it from a boat. I have always caught fish at Wells in December and January.

We just had a tough day.

Friday, December 21

I traveled up the Columbia River, trying without success for steelhead, and then onto Rufus Woods Reservoir.

My sidekick Eric Granstrom and I wanted to see if we could catch a triploid from shore, and I had heard that the fishing had picked up.

I have fished from shore over the years just above the dam at Bridgeport, from the Corps of Engineers Park.

I had not ever fished from Brandts Landing, which is just less than eight miles from the turnoff at the bridge over the Columbia, below Chief Joseph Dam.

Located on the south shore of Rufus Woods, Brandts Landing is a federal park, with pads for RVs, fire pits and outdoor restrooms.

We found several of these sites occupied when we arrived, but found one open at the upper end of the park.

We settled in and after rigging up with slip sinkers we put marshmallows and shrimp on our hooks and pitched them out past the weed line we could see off shore.

We waited quite a while, but my rod started bouncing and the result was a bright and beautiful four-pound triploid.

A while later Granstrom reeled in a regular rainbow of about 20 inches.

We packed up when it started snowing hard.

We stopped and visited with an angler from Arlington who had been there for the weekend and they had caught several triploids to five-pounds here at Brandts.

Monday, December 24

Last week I got a guided tour of the new Colville Confederated Tribe hatchery at Bridgeport.

Funded by the Bonneville Power Administration and other agencies, such as the Grant County PUD, the 50 million dollar facility will be in operation by spring of 2013.

The hatchery is the fourth promised in an accord with the tribes.

The other three are in Leavenworth, Entiat and Winthrop.

Pat Phillips, hatchery manager, said that they will be producing for release over one million spring salmon and over two million summer-run salmon.

The result will be thousands more salmon returning to the upper Columbia River, and the first-ever run of spring salmon to the Okanogan River.

Anglers can expect to see salmon returning to the region by 2015, with the first significant numbers of fish coming back in 2017.

The Colville Tribe will be distributing fish from the hatchery among its members, and sport anglers will be able to take these additional fish.

This replaces the loss of salmon as an important food and cultural aspect of tribal life.

The economic benefits resulting from improved sport fishing will also be significant to the communities in the vicinity of the hatchery and all along the Columbia River.