I had a great time this past week.  I had one of the best days of walleye fishing in quite some time on Potholes Reservoir.  I had a super day on Moses Lake a couple of weeks ago.  Now, I need to get up to Banks and see if it is producing as well as these two waters.  I also got out on Lake Chelan for kokanee.

I wanted to do some walleye fishing, and it is hard to decide where to go right now.  I have had exceptional luck catching big walleye this season.  I have got my biggest walleye ever on Moses Lake, a 24-inch fish, and on Banks Lake, a 25-inch fish.  I was on Lake Roosevelt fishing for northern pike and landed a walleye that weighed 12 pounds!  

I hope you have seen the video I did on walleye and smallmouth bass fishing.  I did with Austin Moser last month.  You can see why Moses Lake is high on my list of places to go for walleye.  I had some good days on Potholes earlier this season, and my fishing buddy in Moses Lake said it would be worth a shot right now.  That sounded great to me, so we are headed out there last Friday.  

I have another reason to hit Potholes.  There are some huge bluegill in here and the crappie fishing has been really good the past couple of years.  I have never taken the time to fish for them, but I plan to next time.  The bluegill we’ve caught while fishing for walleye have been worth keeping. Maybe we’ll find some crappie, too.

I met James and his long-time fishing partner Ryan Harris at what he calls the Pumphouse launch, which is at the east end of O’Sullivan Dam.  We have launched here many times, particularly in the early season when we are going to fish Lind Coulee.  The water was down but we did our usual trick of picking up the person that backs in the boat on the shore.

From there we headed way up lake, past Medicare Beach, to an area they call Three Trees.  This has significance in their over 30 years of fishing Potholes Reservoir.  We ran out our bottom bouncers and Mylar blade rigs and drug them up and down the submerged dunes.  We really weren’t marking any fish here, so we headed down below the mouth of Crab Creek to water that has often produced some good catches for us.  Nothing doing though.  We were scratching our heads about where to go next and decided to try the weedy islands on the west side of the mouth of Crab Creek.

We had fished for over two hours with nothing to show for our efforts and wanted a change for the better.  We passed a boat with two anglers that were trolling very close to the weedy edges of these islands.  They said that they had limited in two hours doing this the day before but hadn’t caught anything so far.  That made us wonder.  Maybe the walleye just hadn’t started biting yet.
James expertly maneuvered the boat around these islands, managing to keep us from hanging up in the weeds.  We were only in about 9 to 13 feet of water for the most part and guess what, that’s where the walleye were hiding. When they decided to bite it was game on!

I had to watch James and Ryan land fish after fish for quite a while.  Finally, I happened onto an orange colored blade of all things, and that worked.  None of us had ever fished this color of blade on Potholes, and it was a winner this particular day.  I was happy to finally contribute to our catch.  
We got our 24 walleye, that ranged in size from 14 to 23 inches, and were heading for the launch by 1:30.  We had some work ahead of us, filleting all those walleye, but we were grinning the whole time we were doing it.  This was the best day of walleye fishing for any of us for a while, and we enjoyed every minute of it.  This week’s photo is of James (on the left), Ryan Harris, (middle), and me with our pile of walleye.

I wanted to give my brother-in-law Tom Verschuren a good fishing trip.  We’ve had some bad luck on our recent adventures, and I really wanted to put him into some fish.  I heard that the kokanee fishing had been pretty good on Lake Chelan, so I figured that would be the place to take him.  I did just that last Sunday.

I wouldn’t say it was a disaster, but the kokanee fishing fell short of my anticipation.  We arrived at the edge of the fleet of anglers just above the Chelan Shores condos at about 7:30. I had been warned that the bite would die about then, and although it wasn’t completely dead, it was slow.  
We trolled and trolled and found a few fish and landed a few and lost just as many.  I got impatient and decided to try some spots across the lake.  I ran over to the Blue Roofs, and once again found just a couple of fish.  I trolled further down lake toward Lakeside Park and landed one and lost a couple more.  

Finally, we wound up right back where we started, and what do you know, there were fish here.  I trolled a line in about 60 feet toward Rocky Point and saw small schools of kokanee fairly consistently.  We were getting some, too, but Tom and I agreed that we had never lost as many as we did on Sunday.  On top of that the wind had come up and we were taking a beating.  I finally pulled in all the gear, and we headed for the launch at Mill Bay.  I had broken one of the rules that I know all too well—Don’t Leave Fish to Find Fish.  I paid for it.

I guess I don’t know when to quit.  In spite of my poor performance on Sunday, I am going right back to Lake Chelan on Monday.  I had promised to take some folks from Bob Feil Boats and Motors out fishing and we had made our plans. At least I know where the fish are now, and to be patient.  Wish me luck!