On Wednesday, May 9, I launched my canoe before dawn next to the roadside dam and trolled until noon to catch seventeen brown trout and two rainbows on floating plugs, a jointed Rapala and a broken-back rebel. Most fish were from ten to fifteen inches in length, but several browns were larger, from eighteen to twenty-two inches. All were released but one three-pound dinner fish. The timing on such a wild surface bite is fleeting, and by summer anglers will do well to fish deeper, targeting the holes and shelves in the lake's north end. Rainbows and smaller browns here will bite on lures and bait pulled behind flashers or dodgers all year, and mackinaw to eighteen pounds have been known to hit the same rigs, so set the drag light and use a high-quality leader, or you'll be crying!

West Carson River: Please pass the Pautske's! Much as I love flyfishing, I started that habit as an adult, whereas baitfishing harkens to some of my earliest childhood memories. Every year in the high water of spring, I like to play again with the simple things, a rod and reel, a few split-shot, a hook and some salmon eggs. This year I brought my wife along for a quick trip to the Woodford's Canyon area of the West Fork Carson. Though tough as nails, Martha is not exactly an "outdoorsy" type, so I limited our trip on May 16 to a mere two hours or so of brush-busting and rock scrambling among the productive runs and pockets strewn between the canyon's raging whitewater stretches. She held up well, not fishing but playing photographer and enjoying the scenery.

Pautske's salmon eggs and a half-nightcrawler proved the undoing of six standard hatchery rainbows. I had many more hits, but I have to hand it to these "dumb" planters, they bit very quickly and lightly, stripping the bait from my hook repeatedly. I released two fish and took the other four home to fry with chili, lime and salt until crispy brown. That's the real reason Martha came. I even got her to kill the trout with a rock as I threw them up on the bank. She moaned about how horrible she felt, and shreiked every time a fish convulsed, but kept whacking away anyhow. Behold the power of my Carribean Pan-Fried Rainbows.

As for timing, GO NOW. The river has been dropping to flows of under 100 cfs, a perfect level for finding and presenting baits to the trout, with just enough speed and turbulence to mask a clumsy approach or less-than-finesse presentation. This river is heavily stocked, and has some decent wild trout as well. A variety of methods are productive, and as the snowmelt flows drop daily, fly-fishing opportunities will become more consistent. Expect low, clear water and difficult conditions for the average angler by mid-summer.

Caples Lake: A nice little trip with the wife is all good and fine, but the next day I got serious, leaving the house alone at four a.m. to reach Caples and push off in my canoe by first light. As with Silver the previous week, this high-altitude reservoir had just shed its winter ice, and I knew I would find its resident mackinaw in the shallows along the shoreline. Yes, light-tackle lake trout, it's a rare opportunity, and a dicey proposition as well. They are actually not trout but closely-related char, introduced to the region in the late 1800's, and known locally as mackinaw because their progenitors were taken from the Mackinaw Island area of Lake Superior. East of the Mississippi, they are commonly known as lakers. Out here, of course, the Lakers are a basketball team, but if you travel to rural Maine, where I first learned to fish for them and the old-timers speak in such thick accents it sounds like a foreign language, you will find that a lake trout is a "togue" and a mackinaw is a type of overcoat. No wonder they laughed at me when I asked for a nice, warm mackinaw at the K-Mart in South Lake Tahoe. Whatever you call them, they have established native populations in area trout lakes, and in Caples grow to sizes in excess of twenty pounds. There are also brook trout, rainbows and browns, with some of the latter going over five pounds as well. My vote goes for a mackinaw, though, as the mystery fish that slammed my fast trolled rainbow-pattern Rebel Broken Back right after sunrise, pulled hard and steady against my drag for a few seconds, then broke my eight-pound-test leader and stole the lure. Not having another copy of the same lure, I switched to a rainbow Rapala Husky Jerk, let out 75 yards of line, closed my spinning reel bail and resumed trolling, jigging my rod tip forward and back to impart a darting action to the plug. As I zig-zagged close to the rock islands near the mouth of Woods Creek, another strike bent my rod and pulled line off my reel's drag; I worked the fish in quite cautiously, making sure not to repeat my last screw-up. "No problem", though, I said to myself when a sixteen inch brown trout came into view and quickly into my net. Only one of the rear treble hook points was embedded in the fish's mouth, making for an easy release, or so I thought until I clamped the plier-jaws of my multi tool to the hook shaft, and the trout began thrashing violently, twisting the expensive Schrade Tough Tool from my grip and depositing it on the lake bottom with a sound that I believe I can actually spell correctly as "Kerplunk!"

This apparently was a sign that I should cease trolling plugs, but I continued to do so anyway for another hour without a bite. Now the sun was on the water, and I decided it was time to try a new slow-trolling technique I've been working on. Yes, friends, now its time for another page from Wiza's black book of forbidden fishing arts: ANCHOVIES. You heard me, I didn't say Balls Of Cheese. Mackinaw are consistently caught on baitfish trolled behind flashers or dodgers in lakes such as Tahoe and Donner, where minnows are permitted, and I've been trying to come up with a suitable substitute for Caples, where use of minnows is prohibited. A Fishsniffer report on Lake Almanor, describing how anglers drift cut anchovies along the lake bottom for landlocked king salmon, got me thinking about the possibility of using this pizza topping for mackinaw. Sure enough, when I checked the California DFG regulations on the use of bait, I found that "Except for restrictions listed under special regulations, dead ocean fish may be used as bait statewide." The exception is for waters with restrictions that prohibit the use of ANY bait. Caples, however, is a standard Sierra District "any method, keep five" lake, and the section on anchovies specifically states that it supersedes the restrictions on baitfish use in this district.

More difficult than gleaning from this legalistic wording that you can in fact use anchovies in lakes like Caples, though, is finding any that are not already filleted, salted and canned. On a trip to Sacramento last winter, I stopped in Broadway Bait and Tackle, and in the freezer, between the whole herring (too big), shad (a freshwater baitfish, and therefore illegal in Caples), and lampreys, with their sucker mouths gaping like toothed anuses (too damned disgusting), I found one pound bags of whole, frozen anchovies. Their shape and size closely resembled that of the most common baitfish in Tahoe area lakes, the Lahontan redside. Bingo! I took home two bags, stowed them in the freezer, and began experimenting with anchovies on trolling trips. The first thing I found is that as soon as they begin to thaw, they become soft and mushy, easily tearing off the hook. This might have deterred me right off, but then I noticed another quality, that others might find equally off-putting, though I found it music to my nostrils- anchovies STINK. This kept me working, perfecting a way to use "nature's power bait" when trolling. Here's the recipe, and although it's probably not the best way to top a nice thin-crust Italian pie, it has proven itself worthy when coupled with a set of silver Sep's Pro Flashers.

Keep frozen anchovies in a cooler on ice until needed. Tie a # 6 or # 4 treble hook to a three-foot leader, then use a long, thin sewing needle to thread leader through the minnow's rear and out its mouth (click on More Stories and read my article Fishing With Minnows for a complete description of bait-threading). Slide anchovy down leader until hook eye meets and enters body, then tie tag end to your flashers or dodger. Use several feet of thread (stretchy spawn-sac tying thread is best) to wrap anchovy, securing it to the leader, from hook to head.

I tried this on Tahoe and Silver lakes without success, and Caples was to be my last proving ground, after which I would swear off fishing anchovies and try to come up with a recipe to serve the seventy-nine I had left in my freezer. Anchovy Cioppino? Anchovy and Chips? I wrapped my bait on as delicately as a surgeon, adapting instructions I had read in a saltwater fishing magazine article- "Trolling Ballyhoo for Wahoo". The anchovy immediately began shedding scales, pieces of flesh, and a multicolored oil slick on the surface, yet stayed together in its corset of bright red thread as I lowered it into the water and let out line on my Abu Garcia baitcasting reel.

I was in thirty feet of water, near the shoreline area where I hooked and broke off a fish three hours earlier. Free spooling my reel and controlling the rate with my thumb, I put my electric motor on high speed and quickly fed out fifty yards of line under tension. I don't care how many magnetic spool control dials it has, if you use a baitcasting reel, you use your thumb.

A watched pot never boils, they say, nor does a watched rod-tip, so I ate a sandwich and then rigged up my spinning outfit with a silver dodger and a nightcrawler. I had just let out enough trolling line to close the bail on my Shimano reel when in the holder on the opposite side of the canoe, the eight-and-a-half foot rod with the anchovy rig went absolutely BERSERK.

Mackinaw are dogged fighters, often loading up your rod on the initial hit until you think you have snagged bottom, then running hard and steady towards that very goal. Tailwalking dances and lightning runs are usually the work of rainbows, sometimes browns, but almost never macks. Tell that to the fish. It jumped partway out of the water three times, then made long, high-speed runs, with split-second directional changes against my eight-pound leader. I steered away from shore to battle my opponent in open water, taking my time to scoop it into a long-handled net in the fifteen mile-per-hour breeze and corresponding chop. Twenty-six inches and lean, the Caples Lake mackinaw weighed around five pounds. I caught three more from eighteen to twenty-two inches on the all-mighty anchovy as well.

Timing: these fish can be caught all season here, but usually frequent the shoreline shallows only early and late in the season. Midsummer heat will concentrate the mackinaw in the deepest holes (50 to 60 feet) off the main dam and in the middle of the lake. A depthfinder is essential to effectively fishing these deep areas, as the bottom is irregular and rocky, with abrupt shelves and drop-offs.

Lake Tahoe: Time to say goodbye. I fish this lake in my canoe from autumn to spring, when boat traffic is at a minimum and great action can be found in the shallows. This year I had many excellent trips, going out nearly every week in winter, when for hours at a time I would not see another boat. On May 21, I trolled north of Cave Rock and caught a three pound mackinaw, a rainbow around two pounds, and a fat, sassy five-pound brown on minnows trolled behind a silver/prism tape Sep's Pro dodger. I deliberately picked a Monday morning and was pleased to find only light boat traffic and no one at all fishing the areas I visited.

That, however was before Memorial Day weekend. This marks the start of Tahoe's summer tourist season, or as one Tahoe angler I know calls it- "The descent into jet-ski hell". Boat traffic increases dramatically from now until labor day, and the no-wake restrictions near the shoreline are routinely ignored by boaters with more horsepower than brain cells. You'd think that current gas prices would cut down on the desire to do endless doughnuts and roostertailing shallow water runs for no apparent reason, but Tahoe is of course a world-renowned showplace for obnoxious wealth.

Call me a crank, but to my mind, if a boat doesn't have rod holders, I don't see the purpose. Though my canoe will be consigned to smaller lakes until the insanity dies down next fall, those of you with fishing boats that can withstand the artificial storm of wake-waves can still expect excellent deepwater fishing. This spring has seen a good number of mackinaw over twenty pounds taken; one guide recently put his client on to a two-mack limit of over forty-four pounds (do the math!), caught on a frog pattern Flatfish plug. I've also had some reports of unusually large kokanee, already schooling up tightly and responding to jigging techniques, off Baldwin Beach.

East Walker River: On May 24, my friend Jeff Keyser and I spent a long day fly fishing this stream, enjoying decent action for the resident wild brown trout. Nymphs drifted deep under strike indicators were the order of the day, with green and tan caddis larvae, beadhead prince nymphs, pheasant tails and olive hare's ears the most effective. We started at dawn in the heavily fished "miracle mile", just downstream from Bridgeport Dam. In the first hour I caught and released four brown trout from fifteen to eighteen inches while working fastwater pockets, and Jeff did even better in the slower meadow section, netting browns up to four pounds. I hooked one that size, but of course it decided to leave its small pool and enter the steep riffles downstream, taking the whitewater express into a tangle of willow branches. Pop! BUH-BYE!

Action slowed for a while, and by midmorning fly-anglers were practically elbow to elbow at each good run, but courtesy and a festive mood prevailed, because like a light being switched on, the trout suddenly started biting again. Looking up and down the river, I saw numerous rods bent and straining, including Jeff's, and just as I began to ask "Hey, where's MY fish?", there it was, a thick bodied Lahontan cutthroat nearly twenty inches long that slammed a #16 prince nymph and thankfully ran upstream before tiring and drifting down to my net.

As quickly and inexplicably as it came, though, the bite then died down, so we broke for lunch, then drove across the border to the Rosachi Ranch catch-and-release section of the river in Nevada. Here we spent the afternoon, again drifting nymphs to take several more trout, all of them small, until Jeff had a flurry of several chunky, sixteen to eighteen inch wild rainbows all from one mid-depth run under overhanging branches. I answered with a good fish of my own, a whitefish, just as big as the rainbows.

We also spotted a small rattlesnake on the riverbank in this desert-canyon section of the East Walker. Please be alert to the presence of these poisonous reptiles. In addition, there are mountain lions, scorpions, and nasty little red ants that will bite you the moment you sit on the bank to change flies. Funny, the tourist season doesn't seem to have picked up too much down here.

Timing: hit the miracle mile early or late. Summer-like air and water temperatures have set in- you may want your waders to ward off the morning chill, but by midday you'll be much more comfortable wet-wading in a pair of quick-drying nylon shorts. In the afternoon heat, faster pocket-water stretches downstream of the Highway 182 are often more productive and much less crowded than the section immediately below the dam.

East Carson River: Fishing reports are by nature after-the-fact, and too often this results in what may be a good story- "You should have been there for ice-out at Silver Lake!", but is in fact of little use to anglers planning a trip. Here's an exception, a report for fly anglers heading out NEXT week to the wild-trout section on the Carson.

Get ready; this river is about to turn on! For several years now, I have closely watched each spring, as it recedes from a raging torrent of icy, brown water into a prime fly fishing stream. Mother Nature and the yearly snowpack determine the timing here, with some years seeing high-water conditions into mid-summer. This season, though, the less-than-average snow in the mountains and warm weather have accelerated the process, and flows have been dropping daily. The Carson fishes best on fly-techniques at 300 cfs (cubic feet per second) or less, and the rate is rapidly approaching this level. (check the United States Geological Survey website, usgs.gov, for the current flow-rate on your favorite river). Two weeks earlier the river was near 1,000 cfs, but on Monday, May 28, the rate was nearly half that.

Having stayed home for most of Memorial Day weekend to avoid the avoid the swarms of locusts, I mean tourists, I was itching to get out, and seeing these favorable flows reported on the Internet, I talked my wife into taking the kids to enjoy a hike and picnic lunch along the banks of the wild-trout section, downstream from Hangman's Bridge, just outside Markleeville. The river looked good as we walked a trail above it in the hot, late morning sun- green but not too murky, and just a bit higher than I prefer for flyfishing.

Sure enough, when we stopped at a prime pool, I found fly-control a bit difficult with my seven-weight rod and floating line, feeling and missing the hookset on only one strike. At the tail of the same pool, though, I had set up my nine-year-old son Joseph with a spinning rod and a Vibrax spinner. As I was tinkering with leader length and fly choice, Joe called out "I got one!" I hurried down to where he was indeed playing a fish, and helped him to bring in and release a wild rainbow trout of around fourteen inches (this section of the river is "zero-limit", catch-and-release only). Joe had one more fish that he played and lost while I continued to work fruitlessly with the fly rod, and then when he tired of casting, I borrowed the spinning rig, tied on a massive, one-half ounce Panther Martin spinner, and dredged up two more similar sized wild rainbows from the deepest section of the pool.

Spinning lures will continue to take fish as flows drop (please remember to pinch down your hook-barbs, as required by law), but at this rate of decrease, within the next two weeks fly fishing methods will begin to shine, then reign supreme for the remainder of the season. Try a green caddis nymph or an attractor such as a zug bug or an egg-pattern on a long leader under a strike-indicator.

Mark (Never stand in a canoe) Wiza