May 12th Oregon Fishing report

[Mike Carey]

A few boat crabbers are, with considerable effort, catching crabs in Half Moon Bay. The dock crabbers are having a difficult time catching enough legal crabs to bother cleaning them, but the Umpqua River has been dropping rather fast recently and hopefully, if that continues there will be more crabs entering a somewhat saltier lower river.

Spring chinook is very, very good above Scottsburg, but last week some commercial salmon anglers did quite well in the ocean and they were not fishing that far from the Umpqua River mouth. It seems that there has been almost no effort by sport anglers to fish the ocean for Chinook salmon. Perhaps they are so used to the bar being closed that they automatically think it is closed when the yellow lights are blinking. However, that may mean a restriction that only effects boats of 16 feet in length or shorter and that has been the case several times over the last few weeks.

There has been a few good shad catches, but one can reasonably expect the fishing to remain slow until the water temperatures rise and the water level drops. Because it is definitely not a low water year when Sawyers Rapids really shines, most of the fishing pressure has been at Yellow Creek and to a lesser degree at Elkton and Umpqua.

The ODFW would like to remind those intending to apply for controlled hunts to get their applications in by 11:59 pm on May 15th.

What happens when, arguably, the two most accomplished high school bass anglers in Oregon team up and enter Oregon’s first annual high schoolbass championship? As expected, they win the thing. The tournament was cosponsored by The Bass Federation of Oregon and The Bass Federation Student Angling Federation and was held on April 30th on the Columbia River at Hood River. Almost all the bass caught were smallmouths and even though all teams entered in the tournament weighed in bass, the river was windy and only two teams weighed in as much as five pounds for their five best fish. Brandon Benedict and Wyatt Seibright, representing Springfield’s Thurston High School weighed in a five fish limit weighing 12 pounds seven ounces, but fell 30 ounces short of the 14 pound five ounce limit taken by Colby Pearson and Jacob Wall who were representing southern Oregon’s St. Mary’s High School.

I would like to address one of the most common mistakes anglers make when fishing for trout and panfish and that is not maximizing their chances of fish species other than the one they are actually targeting. For instance, the most popular baits used by trout fishermen are paste baits such as Berkley Powerbait. However, these baits do not do a good job of catching such incidental species as yellow perch, bluegills, crappies and bullheads. These species, with the occasional exception of crappies, do like worms, but using worms seems to somewhat limit an angler’s trout catch. The solution is to use a very light drag and use the paste bait on a small treble hook and on another dropper, use a long shanked thin wire hook with at least half a nightcrawler on it. The worm hook should be no larger than a #6 to hook the maximum number of panfish. Although not necessary, an easy way to set up this rig is to use a three-way swivel with a slip sinker above the swivel. The reason for the very light drag is to keep the treble hook from ripping free of the small amount of flesh it actually hooks. An angler should use 4# test line or lighter on the dropper leading to the treble hook and six or eight pound test on the dropper leading to the worm because occasionally an angler will hook a decent-sized bass on the worm. Putting a very small bobber or marshmallow on the dropper with the treble hook can, at times, increase fishing success by keeping the bait above any bottom weeds.

On a similar note, anglers seeking trout, crappie or bass should, depending upon legal limits, place one or two very small hooks on short droppers several inches above the jig or lure are casting. The small hooks, #10’s are a good choice, should have a very small tube skirt or fliptail grub on them and what this rig will do is allow anglers to catch smaller trout and panfish, especially bluegills, while targeting larger fish species. This advantage was really well-illustrated to me several years ago when a friend and I landed more than 200 panfish (mostly crappies) from a Coquille-area slough after watching several anglers go fishless despite constant bites because they were using lures and baits with hooks to large for the fish that were biting.
A quick check of Loon Lake last Wednesday proved disappointing. Although I caught a bass from the dock at the upper end of the lake on my fourth cast, closely checking about two miles of shoreline revealed no bass or panfish in shallow water. In fact, I didn’t see any bass in the shallows until after 4 pm and they were in a spot inaccessible to anglers. While fishing deep would probably have yielded better results than the several bass I landed, I wanted to get a feel for when the bass might actually spawn and it appears that it will be much later than nomal. In the meantime, Loon Lake was stocked with 1,875 small rainbow trout last week.
Several Florence area lakes were slated to be stocked last week with Carter and Cleawox lakes receiving 2,500 and 2,000 barely legal rainbows and Munsel and Sutton lakes received 1,500 and 1,000 foot long rainbows. To the south, Tenmile and Empire lakes each received 6,000 trout while Saunders and Eel lakes received 3,000 and 2,000 trout respectively.

While reporting last week on this year’s scheduled trout plants for Diamond Lake, it was pointed out to me that those plants had not yet taken place (and they wouldn’t immediately effect fishing success since they were fingerlings). While it was obvious to me that the plants would be rather difficult since the lake was essentially ice-covered at that time, I didn’t convey that in my report. The trout currently being caught out of Diamond Lake have been in the lake for at least several months and are the healthier and tastier for it.

By Pete Heley

*Pete Heley works at the Stockade Market and Tackleshop in Winchester Bay, Oregon. A brochure of his books and maps can be obtained , upon request, via e-mail from peteheley.com