Another fun-filled day on Billy Chinook. The drive from Bend wasn’t the best. Hwy 97 was icy in spots from Bend through Redmond and started to get worse the closer to the lake I got. I thought it was bad, but that was nothing until I began driving down the hill to the lake. What a nightmare, five miles an hour, first gear 4wheel drive creeping down that hill, finally made it to the bottom turn. It was a solid sheet of Ice.
I drove to the right side of the road in the snow for some extra traction and made it around the turn; no problem; now it is just a straight shot on level ground to the launch ramp piece of cake, not so fast, started to drive down the launch ramp it was a solid sheet of ice all the to the water. I stopped the truck, got out to address the situation, and tried not to slip on my ass. Even if I did get turned around and tried to back in, I would have never been able to stop until I hit the water. Not good, so thinking swiftly, I remembered I had a set of chains in my truck, so we installed the chains, problem solved, and worked like a champ, not even the slightest bit of slipping. Please note to other fishermen that ice is on the launch ramp when it is freezing out. Pull out of the water just enough to drain the water out of the trailer, not on the launch ramp. That was part of the problem: people dragging water all the way up the launch ramp and having it freeze at night. Other fishermen were watching to see if I could pull this off. They decided it was too dangerous and Opted out to fish another day.
So now the boat is on the water. With Happy clients time to fish went out just past the no wake zone, and there was kokanee jumping everywhere, so we grapped the spinning gear with kokanee jigs and started casting at them we started catching fish after the first cast caught three or four nice kokanee and decided to go after what we came there for Bull trout started up the boat and took a short drive passed the Deschutes arm and started trolling with Flatfish and spin n fish all in the blue scale with a nice buttering of Pro-Cure Herring super gel. It didn’t take long to catch a nice 22″ bull trout, released unharmed to fight another day. This was a day to remember. We ended up boating and releasing ten beautiful Bull trout, nothing too big; the biggest was 25-27″. A day that started rough couldn’t have turned out better.
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