I’ve been trying to line up a couple different trips to British Columbia in the next few weeks with the hope of picking up some truly large fish.
I’ve mentioned Dragon Lake in Quesnel before, and that’s certainly my favorite contender at this point.
It’s been about 10 years now, but I once caught a 15-pound rainbow trout there that jumped five or six times. I’ve caught numerous other big fish there and so have my friends.
I sometimes have had to fish all day for one nice fish, but I’m perfectly willing to do that.
Or at least it was until yesterday, when a friend told me he’d just called there and heard the lake had just turned over.
Temperature inversions tend to make fishing difficult because they mix a lot of gunk at the bottom of the lake throughout the water column during turnover. Hopefully, things will be fine at Dragon within the next couple weeks as thinks settle.
But I also saw something in Wayne Kruse’s outdoor column in The Herald today that could make me not worry about driving 10 hours to Canada for big fish. To check out the column Click here
The gist of it is that someone accidentally or purposely (the rumor is that nets were cut) released some huge rainbow trout on what’s called Rufus Woods Lake. They were triploids, fish that are sterilized so they grow faster and can’t reproduce.
Rufus is area on the Columbia River between Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams.
Wayne says he’s heard that people are catching rainbows of 7 to 8 pounds and larger.
I haven’t fished Rufus in many years, but if you know the area, (and even if you don’t) it looks like now is the time to check it out. Larger numbers of the trout have been caught near the pens. But they should be moving further away as time goes on.
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