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Bass Fishing Heating Up

May 082013

The weather is getting much warmer and the water temperatures around the Columbia River Gorge are climbing as well, the smallmouth bass are starting to move. Mid-May to the beginning of June is usually the prime smallmouth bass fishing time around here, but with the much warmer than normal spring temperatures, it seems the season is starting a bit early this year. We’ve been out a few times this year already with typical early season results; not many fish, but the ones caught were good size since only the bigger fish are moving in the cold spring water.

We caught a lot of fish this day, not as big as the past week or so, but when bass of this size start biting, that means the water is warm enough for all the fish to start moving around looking for food and spawning beds. We are anxious to get back out there, but the wind is not cooperating, so it may be another day or two before we can go fishing again.
We took a lot of really cool fishing video that we are editing and will have up on the watermanatwork.com website shortly. We are going to have a lot of smallmouth bass fishing coverage on the website, so stay tuned, the fishing season is really starting to turn on.

First 2013 Fish

Kayak Fishing, News No Responses »

Apr 262013

The first fishing trip of the year did not go so well for the fishermen, but the second trip evened things out a bit. Even though it is still very early in the fishing season, we managed to get a couple big smallmouth bass.
The water in the Columbia River is still pretty cold, maybe the low fifties in most spots. What we look for are backwaters and eddies where the water is a little warmer.

With the melting snow, the water level, temperature and current are constantly changing depending on which part of the river you are on and how much water is being released from the nearest upstream dam. While the “real” smallmouth bass season begins in a week or two, when the water is on the cold side, only the big fish are moving. You might not catch many smallmouths this time of year, the ones you catch are likely to be pretty good sized fish.

Typical for this area, after a couple days of calm winds, we are back to the normal 15-20mph Gorge wind, too windy for kayak fishing on a big river like the Columbia. Trout season opens in Washington this weekend and Oregon is stocking their trout fisheries for the large number of fishermen that go after the Pacific Northwest’s most popular game fish. 2013 fishing season is off and running!

Cascade Locks Disc Golf Course

News No Responses »

Apr 192013

Disc golf is a growing sport, the Columbia Gorge has a number of great disc golf courses, now it has another in Cascade Locks, Oregon. With the economy the way it is, the cost of a couple golfing discs and gas money is all you need to start your own disc golf tour.
There are disc golf courses all over the United States, the same here in the Columbia River Gorge. The Dalles, Hood River, North Bonneville and now, Cascade Locks, all have public disc golf courses that are free to play. Cascade Locks is the closest Gorge disc golf course to Portland, that will probably add to the popularity. North Bonneville Disc Golf Course is right across the Bridge of the Gods, there’s two great disc golf courses that are a little over a half hour’s drive from Portland and Vancouver.
The Cascade Locks course, called “The Locks Approach” has some long holes that will be exposed to the famous Columbia Gorge wind and a few holes with some very tight fairways in a wooded section down by the Columbia River, so it should be a decent challenge for all levels of disc golfer.

We’ll have to get out there a few times this summer, should be a fun place to play.

Blog Remodeling

News No Responses »

Apr 102013

We have done a little remodeling to the WatermanAtWork blog in order to make it a little easier to use.
You may have noticed that there are a couple tabs above these posts that will take you to specific subjects. The “Cameras,Computers,etc.” category has been around a while but the link to it was in a drop down menu that nobody ever saw, hopefully, things will be easier to negotiate. This is mostly tech stuff and reviews about cameras, computers and other gizmos we use around here.
There is a new tab for Kayak Fishing, pretty self explanatory. We are going to be doing a lot of kayak fishing, so check here if that’s what you’re into.
There is a tab for Cycling for mountain and road biking.
The “News” tab has the latest news about the blog or the watermanatwork.com website as well as things not covered in one of the other sections.
If you click on the “WatermanAtWork Blog” title or the “Home” tab, you will go to the blog home page which has all of the posts by date. We have also restored the links to the watermanatwork.com website and the WatermanAtWork YouTube page, they are in the column to the right. You can find previous posts by checking through the Archives dropdown menu or find specific subjects by using the blog Search window above it.

Warm Winter Day

Cycling, News No Responses »

Jan 312013

Winter weather has been in effect for some weeks now. Even if snow has melted in the lower elevations, there is still plenty of snow just a thousand feet or so up in the surrounding hills. It was fairly warm yesterday and downright balmy today, nearly 50°! That’s pretty warm for the last day of January. It’s fairly dry down here in the valley(plenty of mud to be had if you look hard enough) but once you get up to the 1500′ elevation or so, it gets a little messy with the “freeze-thaw” effect.

Plenty of snow left so the slow melt deal we have going on now is causing a lot of melt runoff which in turn makes for a lot of mud. I might have ridden the road bike today but the roads are still covered with lava rock cinders they use when it snows, which is not a great situation for bike riding. Anyway, the road bike is set up in the trainer.
Supposed to have a few nice days coming up, looking to get outside a little more.

Stumptown Slosh Disc Golf Tournament

News No Responses »

Jan 212013

Saturday we were on the Oregon side of the Columbia River to ride our mountain bikes on Gorge Trail 400, on Sunday we headed directly across the Columbia to check out the Stumptown Slosh Disc Golf tournament in North Bonneville, Washington. It was cold and windy, a pretty good challenge for even good disc golfers like the guys who are in this tournament. The North Bonneville Disc Golf Course is a bit different from many other disc golf courses. Not too many places you can be distracted by a spawning salmon in the creek next to you.

Hole 6 -North Bonneville Disc Golf Course

There are a lot of trees on the North Bonneville course that, along with the wind, make it a challenging place to play, no matter how good(or bad) you are

Tee Shot at North Bonneville

The course looks different than in the summer; the grass and evergreen trees are still green, but the deciduous trees leaves were on the ground, blowing in the wind. And, the blackberry bushes that eat your disc if you make a bad shot, are dormant

Tee Shot at North Bonneville

Here’s a short video of the the Stumptown Slosh

North Bonneville is a great place to play disc golf. It doesn’t cost anything, anybody can play. There are a lot of other outdoor activities like mountain and road biking, hiking and fishing around North Bonneville if you want to spend the day or the weekend.

New Surveyors Ridge Photos Added To WatermanAtWork Website

Cycling, News No Responses »

Jan 182013

The work continues on the watermanatwork.com website. Today we’ve added a some photos from the past season’s riding on Surveyors Ridge Trail, one of the classic mountain bike rides here in the Pacific Northwest.

Surveyors Ridge

Here’s the link to the Surveyors Ridge photos.

Tomorrow looks like a nice day, probably a little cool, but no rain in the forecast so we are back out on the trail. I think we are going to give Trail 400 another look.

New Stuff on WatermanAtWork Website

Cycling, News No Responses »

Jan 072013

The weather here in the PacNW continues to be cold, snowy, wet or all the above, so outdoor activities are limited, at best. Which means we’ve had time to work on the WatermanAtWork.com website. We had to do a lot of work cleaning up the website’s computer code, some of which was more than a few years old. The website doesn’t look any different, but you have to do these things to make it work with newer internet browsers, which change all the time. The one thing we did that should be noticeable to everyone who visits the website is that now, when you click on a photo, it will open in a window on the same page and you have the option to view all the photos in the same group in a slideshow. This should make viewing the many photos on the site a lot easier.
We’ve also started to add new content. The latest addition is a bunch of photos of vintage mountain biking, including NORBA racing from Big Bear, CA in 1990 and 1991, which many would say were the glory days of mountain bike racing featuring the pioneering riders of MTB racing as well as photos from the local rides we were doing in the late 80′s and early 90′s around Southern California.

You can find the new webpage HERE.

Check back soon because we have just started adding material and believe me, we have a lot more to add.

Christmas Eve 2012

Cycling, News No Responses »

Dec 242012

The weather has not been so great the past couple weeks; cold, rainy and even a pretty good blizzard that dumped over 6″ of snow in about three hours the other day, so outdoor activities have been somewhat curtailed. Luckily, today we got an early Christmas present of a decent day that allowed us to get on the bike and go for a little ride. It’s still cold, about 40°F and everything is still wet with patches of snow, but it was decent enough to get out on the road bike for a quick spin.

Christmas Eve Ride 12-24-12

The roads were wet with gravel on them left over from the recent snowstorm, had to be careful in spots, especially the gravelly, wet corners, but not bad for the end of December. We headed out into the Hood River valley towards Fir Mountain. The weather always seems to be a little worse on Fir Mountain, today was no exception. When we got to the foot of the mountain, the road was wet, full of gravel with patches of slush in the road and snow on the sides. While we were deciding to go up the mountain or not, a county snowplow came down the hill. We took that as a sign it might be a good idea to pass on the mountain roads today, so we did a loop around the valley and headed home to wait for Santa Claus.

Merry Christmas 2012

Speaking of Santa Claus, we here at WatermanAtWork want to wish all of you a Merry Christmas. Be careful over the holidays and enjoy the time with family and friends.

Fishing On the Klickitat River

Kayak Fishing, News No Responses »

Nov 062012

Another nice day here in the Pacific Northwest. No rain or snow and the fishing season is quickly coming to a close, so it’s back to the Klickitat River for another try at a trophy steelhead or salmon. There are still a few leaves on the trees, but as the wind picks up, most of them wind up on the ground.

It was foggy along the Columbia River, but clear higher up in the Cascade foothills. The Klickitat was still running pretty high, but a little clearer than last week. Still too cloudy for fly fishing, so I used a gold Thomas Bouyant spoon, that had worked before, to start out with. After a few casts, I got a solid hit, set the hook and the fight was on. After a good battle, I beached about a ten pound Chinook salmon.

A few more hours of fishing yielded nothing, so it was off to put the snow tires on the truck and take care of some chores. The weather forecast is for colder and wetter weather, but we are hoping the really nasty stuff holds off for another shot or two at those big fish.

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