Omak Lake Report 2.23.16

With steelhead season winding down, Omak Lake is heating up. I have been getting quite a few reports from the local anglers about how great the fishing had been at Omak Lake. So on Sunday, Luke and I headed over to the lake to see if all the smiles and happy reports were real.

We got to the lake at about 10:30am. We could see 3 fly fishermen waded out into the lake and one of them was fishing on. By the time we got waderd up and the boat launched, these guys had landed about half a dozen fish. That was enough to tell me that the reports I had been hearing just might be true.

3

We headed over to one of the spots that had been good for us in the past, but after about 20 minutes we knew we needed to move. Luke fired up the motor and out we headed into the middle of the lake only to run into something that neither of us expected. A sheet of thin ice, a couple hundred yards long and half that size wide. Now I know it was cold, but not that cold. We headed out of it to the clear shore area and hit one of our other spots.

6

I switched to one of my chub patterns that has a lot of flash in it. After a couple of casts, I had commented to Luke that maybe the fly had too much flash. The next cast proved that comment wrong. I landed a nice 18" female lahontan cutthroat. I caught some ribbing from Luke about my too much flash comment, but that’s ok. I handed him my box and told him to help himself. He spied a minnow pattern and was all over that and wasted no time tying it on. That pattern proved to be successful for him for a while. I kept the chub pattern on and landed a few more nice fish.

5Luke wanted to check out another spot, so he fired up the motor and off we went. As we were heading to the bay he wanted to check out, I spotted a location that just said, "stop, fish me". With in a few casts, Luke and I kept alternating with hook ups and fish to net. After a couple more hook ups, Luke switched to a Kreelex style streamer I had tied up. Once he had the right stripping action for that fly down, it was fish on.

So when asked how that fishing was, it was real good.