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Written by Bob Ellsberg
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Thursday, 01 December 2011 00:00 |
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 Standing on the dock, waiting for my buddy Steve to get the boat trailer parked, I grabbed my little ultralight rod out of the skiff, and cast a little brass spinner into Coffinbury Lake. I really hadn’t used the rod for over a year, and figured I’d best try to get a little of the line wet before we started trolling. After just a couple of winds on the tiny reel, I got a jolt that darn near pulled the rod out of my hand and would have easily snapped the four-pound test if my drag hadn’t been set just a tad loose!
Flying out of the murky shallows, a bright red and silver fish, much too big for this tiny lake, broke the silence of the early morning on the launch ramp. I was going to need some help with this puppy, the boat was between me and the fish, and I had no place to take him.
“Hey Steve, could you get back here pretty quick?” I called to my fishing partner, who was ambling back to the boat. Hearing the splashing on the water’s surface, he figured out that something was going on, and was soon in the little aluminum vessel, digging around in our gear for the landing net. He managed to free it from the life jackets and lunch boxes just as the fish came up alongside.
“I’ll get a net on it as soon as it slows down,” he offered as the fish made a dive under the keel. It wouldn’t take much rubbing on the sides to part the overmatched line, which had seen better days. I was lucky, it held, and the fish rolled next to the boat. Steve took the little trout net and tried to slide the fish into the mesh. He got about halfway up when the fish filled it to capacity, with a full tail and a half still hanging out.
“What is this thing?” he asked, in obvious awe of the glowing chunk of trout.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but we need to get it on shore somehow.”
After a couple of more fruitless efforts to net the fish, it finally was played enough so that Steve was able to push the half-filled net and the fish onto the cement ramp.
Running around the boat, I grabbed the fish just before the hook on the tiny spinner pulled lose. Holding it up close, I could see it was bigger than it looked in the water. With bright red sides and gill plates, it was a rainbow to be remembered!
Trophy Trout
Leaving Steve with the boat, I took the fish up to the check-in station at the picnic area near the lake to claim my prize—this was going to be a good fishing tournament!
My big fish was in the lake courtesy of the Astoria High School aquaculture fund-raiser. This was the second year for the event, and Lee Cain, the head of the program, had planted some amazing fish.
Usually the class raises about a hundred rainbows in their ponds at the high school and tags and releases them in the lake the day before the tourney. This year, however, there had been a problem. A wayward otter had managed to swim up the little creek by the school, and got into the pond. In just a couple of days, it had gone on a killing spree that wiped out the program’s school of trout! Lee had called his friends at the fish hatchery on the North Fork of the Nehalem and they had given him some seventy “trophy trout” to use at his fund-raiser, and they were trophy indeed.
Steve and I had entered this event the first year and, in a style quite common for us, had managed to get mostly skunked. We had landed a 10-inch fish from some previous planting, and never even came close to hooking a tagged fish. Most of the fish that year had been in the 16-inch range, nice trout, but nothing like these fish. My first catch of this day broke my personal trout record (not counting oceangoing steelhead) by a couple of pounds, and it was to get even better!
Most fishermen pride themselves on being prepared for anything. They’ll take a lot of tackle, bait and rods and reels along with them. We, on the other hand, were woefully unprepared for these monsters. Our tiny little rods and light line were perfect for anything up to a pound or two, but we were badly outclassed by the critters we would play with this day. But when the fish bite, you make do!
Winning Technique
During our previous skunking, we had managed a conversation with some anglers who had a pretty good string of fish, with a couple of trophy trout. They had suggested that trolling worms worked really well. The lake was very shallow and weedy from the bottom to just a few feet from the surface. Steve and I had found some light little beaded spinners with a worm hook. As we trolled these behind our boat, the spinner got the fish’s attention and the waving worm got them to strike
And strike they did. Within a couple of hours, I had managed to hook and play five more of the big trout, landing three. Even though our net wouldn’t hold much of the fish, we tired them out, and managed to wedge them between net and boat to get them aboard. Steve hooked three as well, and landed a really big trophy fish after a great battle with the red-sided monster and some sunken trees.
As we took our catch to the prize stand a few hours later, we got a lot of attention. Instead of slinking away in disgrace, as we’d done at the previous tourney, we took the “walk of fame,” hauling the big fish up to be measured and weighed. Steve’s fish was nearly five pounds, and I managed one over six and a bag that totaled almost twenty pounds! I won a great T-shirt as my prize and Steve, whose fish had a rarer tag, won a $70 pair of sunglasses.
As we got in the pickup to haul the boat home, Lee ran over and knocked on the glass.
“You’ve got to tell me,” he said. “What were you guys using for bait? Everyone wants to know.”
I had to chuckle a bit as we described in detail our prize-winning techniques. Nobody had bothered to ask us about our secrets a year ago! n
Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and at rvlife.com.
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Thanks for another entertaining article!
Hope to see you there.
Joel