Trout never cease to amaze me. I have them figured out well enough to catch them on a regular basis, and for the last several years this ability has allowed me to write fishing reports for publication and operate a part-time guide service. Whenever I get too cocky though, I’m humbled and reminded why so many millions of anglers around the world spend so much time, effort and money trying to outsmart a fish with a brain the size of a raisin.

You see unlike many hobbies and careers, fishing has an element beyond simply applying the practitioner’s skill and experience to the task at hand. Accountants crunch numbers; numbers don’t act different in the springtime and they don’t spook when they see your shadow. And although successful anglers have mastered the same type of operational knowledge and attention to detail that many fields require, they also operate in the realm of the gambler, following hunches and ‘funny feelings’ that tell them where to wet a line and how to work the bait. It’s this element of whim, free will and mystery, combined with the ever-changing face of nature that keeps the experience fresh and exciting for me. How high is the river today? How murky the lake? What will the water temperature and wind direction be? Where could the ten-pound trout I just know is in here be holding? Let’s go fishing and find out!

Lake Tahoe: I guess gambling analogies are inevitable on water where you can hunt for the big one in sight of the casinos at Stateline. My home lake is also the perfect example of a spot where the unprepared angler will find the odds stacked against him, while a careful study of the productive areas, equipment and techniques can make getting a bite nearly a sure bet. In late April I had the opportunity to spend two days showing Rick Arnold, a guide and dedicated big-trout hunter from Oregon, how to fish Tahoe from his boat. Rick was in town along with filmmaker Mark K. to shoot footage for the latest DVD in their ‘Trophy Trout’ series.

Within thirty minutes trolling minnow plugs in the area I chose for our first morning out, Rick caught two browns and lost another good one that spit the hook. The largest fish in this little flurry was just under five pounds, a great start to our trip. Okay, maybe ‘showing Rick how to fish Tahoe’ was an overstatement; it was more like, ‘take him to the good spots, show him the trolling runs, and let him go nuts”. The guy knows how to fish. We had a tough bite the rest of the morning though, going several hours without a bite. By lunchtime we managed a couple of small mackinaw, hooked 160 feet deep on live minnows trolled from Rick’s downriggers.

After taking a siesta in the afternoon, we went back out and fished until dark, with Rick catching another couple of brown trout to three pounds. In fact my guest caught all the brown trout on this trip, jig-trolling a Rebel Minnow. On the second day of our filming expedition, we pulled a skunk in the early morning, then I scratched out a small mackinaw topline trolling with dodger and minnow, then another on a minnow at 190 feet on the downrigger. Once again though, Rick came through in the evening, catching a five-pound brown in the shallows right before dark on his custom-painted Rebel.

Rick and Mark then fished for two more days with charter captain Mike Nielsen of Tahoe Topliners. They had an even crazier bite, including one fishless morning and one afternoon where they hooked over a dozen browns, with some in the six to seven-pound range. The brown trout total for two days fishing with Mike was close to twenty fish, and it should be noted that all fish caught on the four-day filming expedition were released to grow larger and contribute to the gene pool of this wild-trout fishery. Though the big mystery was why the browns were on such a great bite, both Mike and I assumed getting a trophy mackinaw on film would not be too difficult, but the shallow mack bite was practically nonexistent.

Where did the big, shallow water springtime lakers go? Well, at least one came back in mid-May on a trip I took with charter captain Kombiz Farokhpour of the Tahoe Fisherman. Kombiz (pronounced calm-bees, which is what you want when you accidentally knock into a beehive) runs a 20 foot Starcraft fishing boat, consistently catching deep water mackinaw for his clients off the downriggers all summer long. In spring and fall though, he works the shallows for rainbows, browns and some of the biggest mackinaw of the year.

I’ve had the opportunity to fish with Kombiz a few times recently, and no, not all the Lake Tahoe guides hang out together, but the cool ones do. We’ve caught fish every time out, and on one short evening trip I was able to slip the net under a nineteen-pound mackinaw for my friend. He hooked this monster on a size nine Rapala plug, trolled on six-pound line along the shore. It was touch-and-go for about ten minutes as to whether Kombiz would be able to work his 37 inch fish out of the jagged rocks on such light line, but he finally pulled it into deeper water and after several trips to the surface and back down again, I had it flopping on the deck. These are the days that make all the hard hours we put in on Lake Tahoe worthwhile!

Gene St. Denis of Blue Ribbon Charters is another hard working guide on Tahoe; he also enjoys catching shallow water trout in the off-season, while in summer he employs specialized deep-water trolling techniques for his clients, catching mackinaw from 100 to over 300 feet down. He primarily trolls live minnows behind huge dodgers to catch the deep macks, but in May this year he put a client onto a 31 inch, ten pound brown trout that bit a minnow trolled at 82 feet off Gene’s downrigger! What a beast! This is not how you normally catch browns here but it’s happened to Gene before and shows that long shots sometimes come in when you gamble for Tahoe trout.

I’ve also been on the lake recently conducting my Tahoe fishing seminars in which I guide clients on their own boats. We’ve mostly been catching average, two-to-five pound mackinaw; some of these have come deep off downriggers, but as of last week there were fish still biting in the shallows as well. The hot lure for topline trolling has been a Rapala Countdown plug, trolled at two to three miles-per-hour over twenty to thirty-foot depths. Addition of attractant scent to the lures helps increase the number of bites, and the hot scent for me lately has been Pro-Cure Trophy Trout Super Gel.

Though I fish Tahoe all year, I do most of my trophy trout hunting here in my cartop boat or canoe from late fall through early spring. At this time I find plenty of big fish willing to bite in the shallows, and very few boats on the water. From Memorial Day through Labor Day though I rarely venture out in my little vessels, due mostly to the high idiot factor on the water. I guide clients who have decent-sized fishing boats all summer, but during our brief warm season I also have many other fisheries to visit!

Silver Lake: This lake set at an altitude of 7,200 feet in Amador County south of Lake Tahoe is a highly productive trout fishery, despite being covered with ice for six months each year. Boasting mackinaw, rainbow and brown trout, it’s always a gamble as to which species will bite best when the ice melts each spring. The one sure thing is that there will be at least a few hungry fish roaming the shallows each spring when the ice breaks up. My best ice-out visit was in 2002 when I caught the lake record, a twenty-two pound mackinaw. Other years have started slow, with only small rainbows or browns hooked on the first few trips of the year. This spring has been very warm, with the ice dissolving in early May, and within the first week of open water I took my friend Jeff Keyser out for dawn patrol in my fourteen-foot boat. We started out in full dark and just as the eastern sky began to glow Jeff hooked the best fish of the day, a four-pound brown with an amazingly long hook-jaw. This fish hit a fast-trolled F-13 Rapala, and Jeff continued to catch browns on this lure throughout the morning. Problem was, they kept getting smaller. The progression was actually very orderly; after his first twenty-two inch fish, he caught a sixteen incher, then a fourteen, and so on down to about eleven inches. What was I doing, besides driving the boat with the accuracy required for Jeff to catch his trout and netting them for him? Oh, nothing much, just being stubborn and trying to catch my fish on Rebels and AC Plugs, even though they were all hitting Jeff’s Rapala. I finally caught one small brown when I switched to a J-11 Rapala, and we ended our trip with a couple of missed bites and six brown trout caught and released.

Caples Lake: Just seven miles from Silver and 750 feet higher in elevation, the ice broke up on Caples about two weeks later, and I made my usual early season pilgrimage as soon as I had a free morning. It was a great trip and the key to my success was starting super-early. Rising at 2:30 a.m., I left my house at 3:00, and after carrying my boat, five-horse motor and gear down the corner of the dam by the light of my headlamp, I was on the water and had a line out at 4:15!

AC Plugs have proven very effective for me here over the last several years; they have caught me brown trout to five pounds and mackinaw to twenty pounds. When I fish with friends who are also experienced anglers, I usually let them use their lure of choice, as long as it fits in with the type of fishing we expect to be doing- Jeff likes the floating Rapala, while Rick Arnold prefers the Rebel Fastrac. I often prefer the AC Plug for trolling though, and when I fish by myself with nobody to second-guess me, I fish with confidence and present my favorite bait in such a way that anything is possible. So I tied on a five inch, black-and-silver AC Skinny by the light of my headlamp and by 7:00 a.m. I had caught two small rainbow trout and four browns from two to four pounds. On my outside rod I trolled for mackinaw with an eight inch, rainbow trout pattern AC, and that rod remained quiet until 7:30, when a five-pound mack smacked it then came in foul-hooked and tangled up in my line. I extricated this nice, 24 inch fish from its predicament, released it and had just let my line out again when the rod bent over hard and I went to work on another fish, a ten-pound mackinaw. I kept one of the brown trout and the larger mackinaw, gently releasing the other fish. I expect I’ll get an Email or two about my wanton slaughter of trout on this lake, but Caples is stocked with several thousand catchable-size browns each year and also gets infusions of mackinaw fingerlings in the range of 20,000 fish some years. Caples and Silver Lakes will offer good fishing throughout the summer, with average-size trout of several species hitting night crawlers trolled behind flashers or dodgers and biting a variety of baits cast from shore, including Kastmaster spoons and Powerbait or inflated nightcrawlers thrown out on slip-sinker rigs. (photo at top)

Upper Blue Lake: When Blue Lakes Road in Alpine County opened at noon on Friday of Memorial Day weekend, there was a long line of cars, trucks and recreational vehicles waiting to access these high altitude lakes. This should have made for a holiday zoo, but on Monday I drove to Upper Blue with my family and launched my cartop boat at noon to find that I had the only vessel on the water! We were fortunate to find the water nearly glass-calm, when the wind usually howls across the lake in the afternoons. I brought my wife Martha and nine-year-old daughter Arielle out on the initial trolling foray, and after twenty minutes without a bite my daughter hooked and reeled in a twelve-inch rainbow trout. “I’m bored!” complained my wife as soon as we netted the fish, and she modeled this behavior so well for my daughter that Arielle soon piped in and said “I’m bored too, daddy!”

So I dropped them off on the shore to join my older daughter Jessica and her friend Blake at the ongoing picnic. This was when my fun began. With nobody to entertain or to distract me from dialing in the bite, I trolled in front of the dam and the trout turned on. I caught and released a 14 inch rainbow, then a 17 inch cutthroat, then had a double hookup where both my rods were jumping and I had to decide which one to grab! Of course as I went to work on the inside rod the fish on the outside went crazy and started pulling off line against my reel’s drag. ‘The fish is always bigger on the other side’, and I almost put my first rod down and grabbed the other several times, but I stuck with the original plan and ended up with a 16 inch rainbow in the net and a big, mystery fish that spit the hook on my other rod. After that I trolled back in front of the dam toward my family, where I observed my wife beckoning me from shore with exaggerated arm motions, like a navy flight-deck controller on an aircraft carrier.

I responded with the same motions in the opposite direction, signaling “No, I will push you and your demands away, then continue fishing.” And that’s just what I did, trolling slowly along the steeply-sloping shoreline. My wife is nothing if not persistent though, and she walked along the same shore, following me, stalking me, eventually climbing up on a boulder to have a better perch from which to yell at me.

“Mark! We’re all bored and there’s no more sandwiches and we want to go!” she called out. At that exact moment I hooked the biggest fish of the day, and when it instantly bent my rod over into a tight, straining hoop, I couldn’t help grinning like an idiot as I yelled back-

“Sorry honey, it’s going to be while!” And it was a sweet several minutes before I netted a gorgeous, brilliantly colored, 21-inch Lahontan cutthroat. A variety of lures are productive for trolling on both Upper and Lower Blue Lakes, including Kastmasters, Rebel Crawfish and #5 Rapalas, but the hot offering on this day was a complex combination of baits. A friend of mine recently told me that I shouldn’t share this secret over the Internet, but I contend that the formula is so weird that most anglers won’t bother to complicate their lives and stink up their boats to duplicate my presentation:

Sep’s Pro Dodger, watermelon pattern, 20-inch leader of six-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon leader, #6 Gamakatsu bait holder hook. Pinch the head off a jumbo night crawler and thread it on the hook using a wormthreader, with the front of the crawler just covering the hook-shank and a long, trailing tail flapping behind the hook.

Inject the crawler with scent using a Pro-Cure bait injector; I use a special mix including salmon egg, shrimp/prawn and herring oils. Add one or two salmon eggs to the point of the hook, and finally, smear one side of the dodger with a thin layer of chartreuse Berkley Powerbait. Tongue of toad and eye of newt are optional. You certainly don’t need all these additions to catch the smaller hatchery rainbows here, but this method has helped me catch many of the larger rainbows and cutthroat that elude most anglers on Blue Lakes.

East Carson River: Continuing our tour of Alpine County, I recently had a chance to drift flies on this great river with my good friend Jeff Keyser, the same guy who just outfished me on Silver Lake. Due to last winter’s paltry snow pack, the East Fork has come into shape early this year and is running at optimal flows for floating line techniques. We fished the catch-and-release wild trout section downstream from Hangman’s Bridge, hiking in just after sunrise. There’s nothing like being on the water here at dawn; we were the only anglers to enjoy the view as clouds to the east turned from purple to red to orange, cliff swallows popped in and out of their vertical, mud-daub nests and skimmed the pools for caddis and mayflies, and a small group of mule deer wound single file up a steep, mountain trail in the distance. As we walked downstream along the bank to start at a favorite pool, we had to scramble up and over a small, rocky hill. I remarked to Jeff that I’ve seen rattlesnakes sunning themselves at the top of this particular hill, and as we reached the top he said “Like that one?”

Sure enough, there was a small rattler, coiled up right in the middle of the trail. With its drab, grey and brown coloration it looked remarkably similar to the cow patties that we step on all the time here. Jeff poked it gently with the tip of his fly rod (another good reason for nine-foot fishing poles) but it was sluggish in the early morning cold and didn’t want to move off the trail, so we went around. Gore-Tex waders are probably not snake-proof, so keep your eyes peeled for rattling cow patties on this river.

We had a slow start, combing a large pool with bottom-bumping nymphs under strike indicators. Jeff and I have the same fly-fishing style, which is to go deep first, switching to dry flies when we see trout feeding at the surface. There was a hatch of super-tiny flies coming off, but only one trout came up to break the surface film for them. So we pounded the bottom, and I turned then lost one fish while Jeff brought a small rainbow to hand.

After an hour we hiked downstream to another prime pool, and this is one of the best qualities of the East Carson. Some trout streams consist largely of pocket water, with fish hiding behind rocks in swift current. The Carson has plenty of these stretches, but also flows through deep, well-defined pools that lend themselves to long leaders, plenty of lead split-shot, and big rainbows. Many of these pools are also long enough for one fly angler to work the tail while another casts to the head. Jeff and I split our new spot, and after working the fast water front of the pool for five-minutes without a bite, my red Styrofoam strike indicator shot underwater and I set the hook on a hard-fighting fish.

I asked Jeff, conveniently positioned downstream of me, to net it for me. It took a couple of minutes and several attempts for him to scoop the trout up; we found it was a fat hatchery fish, one of the ‘Alpine County Tourism Booster’ rainbows planted in this river. At nineteen inches, it weighed probably three-and-a-half pounds; its recent hatchery status was evident in the small, worn tail and ridiculous girth. We gently released this fish, but just as Jeff returned to his own business, drifting nymphs below me, I called out for his help again! Another big fish had grabbed my fly and was now ripping line off my reel and leaping all over the pool! Jeff once again blocked it from running downstream and eventually netted another big rainbow for me, this one over four pounds.

So we had a couple of large trout to net, but they were fresh products of the hatchery, nothing you couldn’t find on the heavily stocked, ‘put-and-take’ sections of the East and West Carson Rivers. Plenty of the rainbows planted above Hangman’s Bridge run downstream; In the first few miles from the nearest planting site, hatchery trout are predominant, but for each step taken further into the backcountry, more and more holdover and wild trout can be found.

After my friend and I finished fishing our second pool, we continued working our way downstream, trading spots along a shallow part of the river, drifting our nymphs through minor holes and prolonged riffles. In one of these holes, just deep and long enough to bounce bottom a couple of times with weighted nymphs, another big trout smacked my fly hard and quickly jumped out into the main current of the river, straining my four-pound tippet to near its breaking point. As this red-striped rocket zig-zagged crazily over the shallow, rocky-bottom riffles my leader rubbed and caught on the rocks repeatedly, but came free again, frayed and weaker each time. The fish used the current to its advantage and kept working further downstream from me, which was a bad situation and quickly getting worse. As I stumbled down after it, Jeff once again waded out, feinted left then right to spook my trout from running further down, then managed to get about half of it into the net, which was enough. “Wow.” I think we both said it at the same time, looking at the twenty-five inch, six-pound, buck rainbow. This one was no fresh stocker, and though the shape of its tail led us to believe it was born in a hatchery, its brilliant colors and excellent condition told us of many months spent in the wild. We each caught and released six rainbows and lost a few more that morning on a variety of attractor nymphs, including San Juan worms, bead-head prince nymphs, and egg patterns, but my three big rainbows all crushed a conehead woolly bugger, dead drifted along the bottom. This river also produces a few cutthroat and brown trout, as well as some trophy whitefish.

And that’s just a partial list of great trout waters within an hour of my house, and a journal of spots my friends and I fish each spring. Summer and fall only bring more and varied trout fishing opportunities, and come to think of it, winter’s pretty darn good! So next time you come up to Tahoe, why not try a different kind of gambling?

Until Next Time!
Mark (Never Stand In A Canoe) Wiza
Pro-Staff for AC Plugs and Pro-Cure Bait Scents
Email Me!

Mark is a licensed fishing guide offering a small number of fun and highly educational trout-fishing trips in the Tahoe area. Call (530) 545-1475 or mail Mark wiza@fishsniffer.com for details.