Finally, a short break in the windy conditions here in the Columbia River Gorge allowed us to get out for a couple days of kayak fishing on the Columbia River. It wasn’t dead calm, but compared to the daily 20mph winds we’ve been having, it was calm enough to safely get out on the big Columbia River.
We launched both days from Deschutes State Recreation Area, where the Deschutes River empties into the Columbia. It’s an easy place to launch a kayak from and a short paddle to the Columbia. The Deschutes River is a popular rafting, boating and fishing spot, it can be crowded at the launch area, especially on nice summer weekends. The Deschutes rivermouth is a also a very popular salmon fishing area, during salmon season expect full parking lots, busy boat launch areas and people camping on the side of the road around the area. During salmon fishing season, you can expect to see more than a hundred boats on the Columbia River at the Deschutes rivermouth.
Wanting to get the most out of the fishing days, we launched into the Deschutes River by sunrise.
On the first day of fishing, we headed out to Miller Island looking for smallmouth bass. Miller Island is a big island, headed east is paddling upstream and there are a lot of strong currents and eddies around the island, you have to pay attention to what you are doing at all times. There was a constant 5mph wind blowing with stronger gusts, making the paddling more difficult. The channel between Miller Island and the Washington shoreline has a lot of current and the water goes from more than one hundred feet deep in spots to only a couple feet in others, it’s a challenge to paddle. This north channel is where most of the smallmouth bass are, mostly along the rocky sections of the Washington shoreline. There are some places on Miller Island that hold bass, mostly near the west end of the island.
On the second fishing day, we stuck mostly to the shoreline along the Oregon side of the river. We tried drift fishing for walleye, but the current was pretty strong and combined with a constant 5mph wind and stronger gusts, it made that kind of fishing pretty tough and didn’t hook into any walleye. Other boats were trolling for walleye and they weren’t having any luck either, so you could say the walleye were just not biting. We did manage to catch a few smallmouth bass, all of them were pretty good size.
I also managed to hook into a small sturgeon that put up quite a fight on the light tackle I was using. Sturgeon is all catch and release these days so it was released unharmed back into the river.
The days are long this time of year and we spent two straight days paddling and fishing on the Columbia River; ten hours the first day and about eight hours on the second day, so today I am pretty tired and baked from the sun. It was a good couple days of fishing, who knows how long it will be until the conditions are right to hit it again. We have some video of the trip, we will be posting it on the WatermanAtWork.com website and the WatemanAtWork You Tube page shortly.