Wow, wow, wow ... fishing was excellent at Jones on Sunday the 22nd. We trolled black wooley buggers, green and burgundy leeches and the best fly was a tiny egg sucking leech. Between the two of us, without a word of a lie, we caught and released over 60 kokanee, rainbow and cutthroat. Most kokanee were caught at the campground end of the lake in the later afternoon on the egg sucking leech. The largest kokanee was maybe pushing 12". The rainbows hit the black woooly bugger very aggressively in the morning and then the egg sucking leech in the evening 5-8pm. Three rainbows about 1.5-2lbs but usually 12" and smaller. The cutthoat were hitting well throughout the day and really became aggressive in the evening when they were really pounding the egg sucking leech. My biggest cutthroat was a good three pounds but that ugly blackish, yellow spawning colour.
We easily dropped the boat about mid lake at the slide/washout area and trolled straight accross to the other side. Morming action was furious with many double headers. We found the beast place to be where the run-off streams trickle into the lake and almost to the monitoring station. In the evening we hit the campground end as earlier stated and the action was none stop.
I tried out my new 8hp. 4-stroke Yamaha and what a sweet motor. Super quiet - we easily had a conversation with a pontoon boat fisherman while we were trolling and he too was impressed with how quite the motor ran. seriously the loudest part of trolling with that motor was the sound of the cooling water pissing into the lake.
In the morning my buddy had slighly better action with an un-weighted green micro sparkle wooly bugger on a floating line than I did with my intermediate clear sink line and my favourite #8 black wooly bugger with a few strands of crystal flash and two strands of blue flashabou in the tail, blue crystal chenniele body and copper bead head. I love this fly at Jones. As the sun came up and into the evening my clear line was hands down the hot line. I added two strips of lead tape to my buddies floating line after the sun came up and immediate success.
Overall very good day, we released every thing except a few kokanee that my buddy wanted for breakfast. Very sad to see some people keeping small fish. One boat was keeping fingerling kokanee. One boat, nice welded aluminum 12 or 14' with five men, possibly Portugees, was keeping what appeared to be everything they caught. They stopped at the far end of the lake at the run-off stream to clean and pack up their catch. We couldn't tell for certain of species but they had a bag full of small fish that they were packing into their cooler. Pretty sad to see but what are you going to do up there? Can't call out. Can't identify their vehicle or licence plate. They knew we saw them but that didn't stop them from getting right back out there to bag a bunch more. Sad.
I tell you though the 4X4's sure made a mess in the mud pit and really loosened up the sand in access points to the lake. I'm sure quite a few vehicles would have had a tough time getting out were we launched. I wouldn't dare drive down to the lake without 4-wheel drive.
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Topic: Jones Lake report May 13th (Read 1818 times)