Photos From Recent Fishing Trips

I've gone fishing quite a few times during the last five weeks. The first couple of trips were fun, but pretty much fishless. The last three trips, however, were great. Over Father's Day weekend, Carl, Steve, Steve's extended family, and I hiked in to Marion Lake in the Jefferson Wilderness and probably caught 90 trout total in our group, releasing most of them (of course).

Last Saturday, Danimal, Larry (Danimal's dad), Mark, and I hiked in to some lakes located in the Three Sisters Wilderness (that's a picture of one of them at top). The first lake we tried had no fish in it -- at least none that were interested in biting -- so we decided to hike over to another lake. The other lake wasn't easy to find -- it is not on a trail so we had to do a bit of cross country -- but we finally did locate it and the fishing was good. We caught two brook trout and 13 cutthroat, and kept nine fish (pictured above) for the smoker. The fish were 11 to 14 inches in length, and were actually hitting spinners casted from the shore, which was great fun. The mosquitoes were pretty bad, though -- I wouldn't recommend going into the Oregon wilderness this time of year without lots of bug repellent.

And on Monday, my fishing guide buddy Phil took me, Steve, and Tom sturgeon fishing on the lower Columbia and we had a big day. We had six anglers on the boat, and each fisherman is allowed to keep one sturgeon per day between 45 inches and 60 inches in length. Well, the boat limited out by 9:20 -- the bigger fish pictured above was 57 inches in length -- but we continued fishing until about 12:20 pm doing catch and release, and ended up getting over thirty fish total.

The cool part was that about 24 of the fish we caught were between 45 and 60 inches long, meaning that we ended up bringing an additional three limits to the boat after we limited out. Usually it is the other way around -- you catch a few keeper-sized fish and the rest are sub-legals -- but not that day. That's me on the right holding my keeper sturgeon.

Thanks for a great trip, Phil.