High Lakes: Get out your gear, folks, the ice is breaking up! Silver Lake has just finished icing out, with plenty of floating debris right now; Red Lake is still 70% iced in, and will break up over the next week. Caples is 90% covered and won’t be clear until May twenty-second. How’s that for a psychic prediction? Okay, that’s just an estimate, and I cheated by checking each roadside lake Sunday morning, when I tricked my wife and kids into thinking I just wanted to drive, hike and picnic in the beautiful alpine environs alongside Route 88. Each of these lakes is a worthy destination for ice-out action, with Red kicking out brooks and cutthroat, Silver known for browns, and Caples providing an opportunity for trophy mackinaw. The road to Blue Lakes is not yet open, but expect that gate to be unlocked soon, due to the light snow cover and summer-like weather.

Tahoe, Fallen Leaf: Tahoe is still the place for topline action, with big, wild browns and rainbows attacking trolled plugs and live minnows. I experienced a slow surface bite on a trip to Fallen Leaf recently, but action was decent for mackinaw at 100 to 150 feet. Look for these fish on your depthfinder along the steep west shore drop-offs, at the base of Mount Tallac. Try a two ounce mother of pearl Crippled Herring spoon for vertical jigging, or flashers and a minnow for deep trolling.

Indian Creek Reservoir: This shallow, fertile reservoir off Airport Road near Markleeville is producing well for anglers soaking power bait in all the kooky colors. It is heavily stocked each spring, and also grows holdovers an astounding rate due to the numbers of insects and baitfish thriving in the soupy green water. This lake was once used as a holding pond for treated sewage effluent, and we’ve all heard how well manure helps things grow. Just remember to throw back any finless browns.

Now let’s talk about where I went opening week of trout season, the East Walker and the Little Truckee. These are both tailwater rivers, with flows controlled by dam releases; the Walker receives its water from Bridgeport Reservoir in Mono County and the Little Truckee is fed by Stampede Reservoir north of Truckee. Both rivers are good early season bets when the snow-fed streams are high and brown. My friend Jeff Keyser visited the East Walker on opening day, and reported big crowds but big fish as well. He started at dawn, catching browns and rainbows to over twenty inches, then found himself effectively crowded out of his favorite spots by late morning. Evidently the fishery has survived the oil spill caused by an overturned tanker truck last winter- some of the spots Jeff fished were downstream of the spill site, and he found the fish healthy and hard-fighting, with no evidence of oil in or near the stream.

This was the news I was waiting for, so on Wednesday, May second, I brought another friend and visited the river. I had this stupid idea that I would teach a dyed-in-the-wool, hatchery truck following bait angler to fly fish for wild trout. Brad Brosman and I arrived at the "Miracle Mile" section of the river, just below Bridgeport Dam, before dawn in order to beat the crowds. Spin anglers quickly lined the Big Hole at the base of the dam in the semi-darkness though, peppering the huge, turbulent pool with spoons, spinners and plugs. My friend joined them with his spinning rod and Vibrax spinner, while I drifted the channels immediately downstream with my fly rod, nymphs and strike indicator. I had no bites for the first hour, nor did I see a single fish caught by anyone else. As the morning progressed and I waded downstream, though, dead-drifting nymphs along the bottom of each pocket and channel, my luck began to improve. First I netted and released a beautiful, 6 inch, parr-marked brown trout, then hooked and lost a fish around sixteen inches, I believe a rainbow. Both hit a green caddis nymph. Continuing downstream, I next caught a brightly colored Lahontan cutthroat, showing it to my friend, who had now joined me. He told me no one was hooking anything in the Big Hole, and started grumbling something about "...driving halfway to L.A. to catch nothing". I told him to switch from spinning gear to my other fly rod, which I had brought along for him, and just as I said it, I had another fish. This one turned out to be a decent brown, 16 or 17 inches. It leaped and quickly got below me, shooting into some fast riffles. Brad was nearby, so he netted the fish for me and held it in the water until I waded down for a quick photograph and release.

"Okay, okay, I’ll try the damn fly rod!" was his comment at that point, but by then we were hemmed in on either side by other anglers. I suggested another spot, downstream of the Highway 182 bridge, and Brad, who had started yelling at a big guy starting to crowd us, quickly switched gears and agreed. Upon arriving at the stretch of boulders, runs and pocket water, I was glad and surprised to see we were completely alone. We chose our flies on the bank while I gave Brad instructions as to proper nymphing technique. He was about to wade right in when I pointed out a good channel against the shore.

"Don’t fish out there until you hit the water right in front of you." I told him. "Sometimes they’re right against the bank, and you can make your first drift from shore; watch this." I arced my weighted flies overhead and back down into the water directly upstream, no more than five feet out from where I stood on the grass. My team of beadhead nymphs drifted deep, and at the end of my drift, a big fish shot out from a tangle of half submerged bankside willow branches, slammed my dropper fly, an olive possum, and slipped back into the branches, quickly breaking me off.

"Yikes!" I retied, with heavier tippet. This is a common problem for nymphers on the East Walker. You really do get more bites on light line, four or even three pound test, but you will lose the larger fish.

Meanwhile, Brad was working with the fly rod, making some decent drifts, but not connecting. I stayed near him as we worked upstream, giving him advice and encouragement until he said "Why don’t you just shut up and fish?" That’s what I did, but neither of us caught anything for an hour and through several fly changes. Finally, just behind a large rock, I netted a decent whitefish, two pounds or so. Hey, they may not be trout, but they fight well and hit the same flies, filling in many a dull moment on the Walker. Brad apparently found the entire fly fishing experience to be one big dull moment, because he soon switched back to his spinning rod and a Rooster Tail spinner.

He seemed a little short-tempered at this point, but I made things much worse when I decided to take a break from drifting flies as well. I went back to the car and broke out my spinning rod, tying on a five inch rainbow pattern Rebel Minnow plug. I cast this floating lure across and downstream, then began ripping it back up through pockets and runs with downward sweeps of my rod-tip. Dig and pause, dig and pause, reel in the slack. Brown trout will take a tiny nymph on this river, as it moves downstream with no action at all, but at times they also react to a large baitfish imitation that alternately swims frantically, then floats up as if dead. Streamers work, but backcasts are tough when you are hemmed in by a wall of streamside willows. Spinning gear and minnow plugs make a great substitute, though, and sure enough, a 15 inch brown whacked the plug on my third cast. Another brown, slightly larger, came to net just a few casts later, and when I moved downstream and dropped the plug into another pocket, a better fish, eighteen or twenty inches, rolled on it and stayed on briefly before thrashing at the surface and throwing the hook. Brad was watching all this, and though he finally managed to catch a 14 inch brown on his Rooster Tail, he switched to a plug, and of course then the bite promptly shut off. He was getting more and more irritable, so I decided to cut our losses and leave.

We fished the meadow section, once again drifting nymphs under strike indicators. After a half hour, Brad yelled to me and I looked to see his rod bent and quivering. Yeeha! I watched with satisfaction as he played and netted his first fish on a fly rod, a gorgeous wild rainbow. It hit an orange egg-pattern fly, so I switched to a red one, and in short order netted and released several more rainbows in the fourteen to sixteen inch class, then hooked and of course lost a substantially larger fish that leaped and ran downstream faster than I could follow.

Brad had one more bite, fighting a fish for a moment before losing it, then the action stopped, and though we varied flies and techniques for another hour, the fish failed to respond. Once again, Brad had reached the limit of his attention span- "Well, that was my first and LAST fish on a fly rod. I’ve tied more knots and untangled more line in one day than I do in a whole season of baitfishing. And no more of these damn wild trout waters either. A bunch of prissy trout that won’t bite on three pound test! I’ll be by the car."

I admit, he had a point. I'm an experienced fly fisher, and had been working hard for not very many fish over the past two days, losing all the big ones and a dozen flies as well. Still, that’s what intrigues me about wild trout rivers. I want a challenge; Brad wants to sit in a lawn chair, drink beer, and catch fish on Velveeta. I decided to let him stew for a while back at my car while I worked downstream to a deep pool near the river’s mouth at Boca Reservoir. There I came upon a scene that showed me everything wrong with the lazy ass, lawn chair, hatchery fishing philosophy so prevalent these days. Empty beer cans, bags from McDonald’s, tangles of fishing line and smears of chartreuse sparkle Power Bait were everywhere on the bank. In the nearby shallows, a dead 17 inch wild rainbow lay on the river bottom. A bit of line and, yup, you guessed it, chartreuse sparkle were visible in its mouth.You’d think that anglers would be the first to respect and care for nature, but we’re talking about poachers here, so we’ve already ruled out ethics.

I knew that ALL the wild trout couldn’t have fallen for fluorescent green dough-balls, though, and at the fastwater head of the same pool, as evening shadows lengthened, I caught three more exquisitely patterned wild rainbows on a beadhead Zug Bug nymph. Yes! Sure, I’d like to catch the anglers who trashed the area, cleaning their clocks with my seven-weight aluminum fly reel or piercing their ears with a #2 streamer, but just releasing each fish, knowing they were still there after the onslaught, felt like sweet revenge. Next week I think I’ll contradict myself and soak some bait in the heavily stocked sections of the West Carson, where it’s legal. To all the e-mailers who have shared their thoughts recently, I’d just like to say that your questions and comments are very much appreciated. The volume is greater than I can keep up with, so don’t be offended if you don’t hear back from me. If you spot me on your favorite wild trout river, stop and say hello, unless you’re poaching, in which case I suggest you run.

Until then, remember, there's no heat, no bathrooms, and no whining in a canoe.
Mark (Never stand in a canoe) Wiza