Gilbert Lake

Even with water levels dropping slowly, the water's still quite high and silty in the streams and rivers.  With that in mind, we decided on another evening of lake fishing. This time around, we left the boats at home and instead opted to fish from the small fishing pier at Gilbert Lake.  It was a beautiful night for fishing: cool and clear with next to no wind.  Even when the wind is calm back in "civilization" it's often quite breezy (and quite a bit cooler) up in the hills that form the basin for Gilbert Lake so we were pleasantly surprised to find the water as smooth as it was.

The local knowledge calls for a spinning rod with a marshmallow rig to catch the stocked rainbows holding in the deeper parts of the lake.  It's an extremely hands off approach.  Cast your line out there, let it sink, real in any extra slack, prop up the rod, and sit back and watch the tip for any odd wiggles.  The nice thing about that is on a night like tonight, you do all that and then bust out your fly rod and spice things up a bit.

My 5-weight with floating line is definitely not the right set-up for lake fishing under most conditions, but there was a little bit of surface activity tonight and I really just love to cast.  I started off with a wooly worm and fished that until I snagged it on a back cast and lost it.  That caught me a fat old bluegill.  After that, mayflies began swarming so I switched to dries.  My novice identification: grey fox and a few light cahills (Ephemera guttulata & Stenonema canadensis respectively).  The grey fox's seemed to be mostly preoccupied with flying around and mating and weren't touching down on the surface yet, so I went with some light cahill patterns and did my best to fish to the occasional rises.

Lake fishing is definitely a different animal and one I need to work on more.  The fish don't hold in one spot waiting for food to drift by in a lake so you need to kind of guess where they are and where they're going.  With the rises so infrequent tonight, I didn't do a great job, and based on my results, they might not have even been rainbows rising.  Aside from the bluegill, I netted two 12-14" largemouth bass on the light cahill.  I have to admit, fighting even small bass such as these guys is pretty fun on a 5-weight.