Full limits, tall tales: Fishing season opens

Washington’s wisest trout anglers were asleep when the lowland lake fishing season opened Saturday at 12:01 a.m.

Mike Pabst of Spokane wasn’t one of them.

“I was out on the lake at midnight as usual, but this year all I caught was cold,” he said.

Pabst was preparing to go out again at Williams Lake, this time in the Saturday morning sunshine that finally snapped one of the region’s snowiest and coldest springs.

Indeed, snow-plugged roads or a persistent cap of ice prevented at least 20 northeastern Washington lakes from being stocked with trout before opening day.

Marillyn Kilpatrick, 81, who camped with her family at Fishtrap Lake Resort, said she got out of the tent Saturday morning to find “ice on the water bucket and the spoons we didn’t wash last night were frozen to the bowls.”

By 11 a.m., kids were shedding their stocking caps and people were wearing T-shirts as they launched their boats.

Anglers’ spirits and trout appetites both got a boost as temperatures soared into the 60s.

“The fishing got off to a slow start, the slowest I’ve seen in years,” said John Whalen, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife regional fisheries manager. But staffers checking anglers at the region’s lakes reported that catch rates were picking up by noon, he said.

As usual, Cheney-area lakes were among the state’s hot spots.

Williams Lake was the Spokane area’s top producer as most anglers were able to catch five-fish limits. Williams anglers often released smaller fish in order to catch a higher ratio of larger trout supplied to the lake by Klink’s Williams Lake Resort.

Fish Lake near Marshall and Fishtrap Lake near Sprague also provided very good fishing and limits for determined anglers.

Fish Lake is stocked with brook trout and tiger trout, an unusual species combination in Spokane County.

West Medical and Badger lakes were much slower than usual, averaging fewer than two fish an angler for the first time in years on an opening day.

North of Spokane, Waitts Lake was one of the busiest waters, perhaps taking on some of the clientele that normally goes to lakes such as Marshall, which was still covered with ice.

“We checked a lot of very nice 18-inch brown trout out of Waitts,” Whalen said.

However, Rocky Lake saw the fastest fishing of the northeast lakes surveyed, with at least four fish per angler. “They were mostly around 11 inches long,” Whalen said.

Yocum Lake in Pend Oreille County was still ice-capped this week, preventing hatchery trucks from bringing in a fresh plant of trout. But a WDFW staffer checked the lake anyway and found one angler having a ball.

“One person is a small sample size and not meaningful statistically,” Whalen said. “But this fisherman was able to break through the ice he caught his limit of five trout that had carried over from last year.”

Survey stats don’t even mention the nice sunglasses reeled up from the Williams Lake bottom by 7-year-old Skyler Barcellos. Last year, she said, someone in her family hooked and netted expensive Oakley sunglasses from the same spot off the Williams Lake Resort dock.

Aaron Gates, of Elk, said he trolled for six hours to catch four rainbows at Diamond Lake. “Generally opening day is no problem,” he said. “This year is different,” he added, pointing to his pickup and boat trailer, which were parked on a snow bank at the public boat ramp.

Resort owner Jerry Klinkenberg said the water temperature at Williams Lake was nearly 10 degrees colder than on a typical opening day.

The slow start to the season has a silver lining, Whalen said.

“There’s still a lot of fish out there and anglers should find some great fishing in all of these lakes as the water temperatures warm up and fish become more active in the next two or three weeks.”