Headed out early this morning to beat the wind for a quick kayak fishing session on Rowland Lake. It’s been pretty windy for the past week or so with rain showers drifting through.
Since the trout fishing has been so good lately, that’s what we were looking for, but sorry to report that the trout fishing was very slow. Only had one bite and caught one rainbow. A week ago, we were catching ten trout an hour. What happened? Well, the water temperature in Rowland Lake, which is connected to the Columbia River by a culvert, was almost 65°F. That’s pretty warm for the Columbia River, so I’m guessing the warm water is making the cold water loving trout a bit sluggish. There were fish surfacing all around the lake, mostly near the shoreline with birds diving on them. Turns out they were small bluegill looking for spawning nests, easy pickings for the ospreys and herons. I would guess that the bigger fish surfacing today were either smallmouth bass or carp, maybe largemouth bass, I don’t know if they are in this lake or not.
For more trout fishing, we will need to head up into the Cascades, but the roads to the local high country lakes are still under a foot of snow. Guess it’s either bass fishing down here in the river basin or wait a week or so until the snow melts in the hills.