Wayne Kruse’s Pick of the Week: Brewster Pool triploid rainbow

Some 117,500 triploid rainbow trout escaped from a net pen in June, between Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams, according to Pacific Seafoods, owner of the trout-raising operation. Many of those fish have worked their way downstream, and the state Fish and Wildlife Department has opened the Brewster

pool during the month of August to recreational fishing for the big trout. A lot of the football-shaped rainbow are running 4 or 5 pounds, with a few up to the 8-pound range, and they’re much closer to home than the hard-to-get-to stretch of river where the net pens are located.

Rod Hammons (509-689-2849), salmon/steelhead guide and Brewster resident, said the upper, Bridgeport, end of the pool has been best, because it contains more of the faster, steelhead-type water the trout prefer. Backtrolling K-13 or K-14 Kwikfish, or Hot Shots, in red or silver will catch fish, Hammons said, as will drifting a float-and-jig rig with a piece of shrimp, on the edges of the faster, shallower water, off points, and along the edges of back-eddies.

“There are a lot of them around,” Hammons said. “We (salmon fishermen) can’t keep ’em off the hook when we’re backtrolling plugs for chinook; even the big Kwikfish.”

The state is afraid the big rainbow, which are voracious feeders, will pose a threat to juvenile steelhead, some of which are listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act.