Great weekend of fishing on magical Rufus Woods. Headed up to the mighty Roof last weekend with the magnificent seven talked about in earlier posts. Sorry for the delay in posting Blufin I've been busy with the honey do list after being at Rufus all weekend. Gotta keep the wife happy or my fishing lines stay very dry. ;-) Jack Bauer, Zaskar and I got up there Friday at noon and checked in to the cabin. While I hate to "let the secret out", the folks at Cabin by the River are the best. The cabin was comfortable and fully furnished including firewood for the firepit, pots and pans, charcoal for the grill, a fish cleaning area etc. They even brought out a bucket of fertilizer to help melt some of the snow/ice. Great folks! The launch was very nice. Found it easier to put in on the western half of the launch but we had no trouble. The fishing on Friday was a little slow compared to years past. Tried several methods and colors. Caught one trolling a perch rippn minnow, one on a black blue fox near the shoreline. Went to the first set of pens to the east of the cabin. Very slow fishing. My brother Jack Bauer made the trip up from Boise and he finally hooked up a 7 lb pig on a white and silver frenzy trolled next to the pens. We boated a total of five for the day. Saturday we headed back to the pens and were not having much luck. We watched with amazement as our boat of four was getting skunked while a boat of two near us was reeling in fish after fish. After a couple of hours my ego could take no more. I didn't feel so bad when I found out that it was the legendary Rufus Wood fishslayer Blufin loui. What a spectacle. Don't let anyone tell you differently though, Blufin's wife was the real reel master that day. She boated several fish in the time it took me to change my jig. Loui hooked us up with some of his special squid and shared with us some of his fish wizardry. Needless to say he changed our fortunes. By the end of the day we were able to land about ten nice sized triploids(releasing all but five). We had luck on a jig tipped with the squid as well as with a white frenzy. The bite lasted for a couple of hours and then dropped off. We found the best luck trolling, casting, and jigging parallel to the pens. After Team Blufin caught most of the fish in the lake and left for the day we tried his spot, and techniques with zero luck. Thank you Loui. You are a class act. Your fishing skills are only matched by your generosity and friendliness. We headed back to the cabin to crow to the other boat in out party who were only able to land one fish. Snicker. Snicker. The owner of the property (Dan or Dave?) sorry we couldn't remember his name came down to the launch to see if we needed help since it had snowed making the launch icy. Hellova nice guy!!
After a hard night of poker and celebrating we were only able to crawl out of bed and get on the water by an embarrassing 10 am. The owner told us the cabin was open the next day so we could leave our stuff there if we wanted to fish all day and clean the fish before we left. Fishing was slower. We tried several techniques with little success. Finally we were able to land three at the pens with a black jig before leaving. Final tally: Jack Bauer had the biggest fish each day, Jdawg had by far the most fish, and Zaskar......well Zaskar had the pretty boat....and a few fish. ;-)
One poor soul in our boat didn't catch a fish all weekend. He had multiple bites but couldn't seal the deal as he keep setting the hook too hard. After one bite he set the hook so hard that honest to God all he pulled in were lips and a skeleton. Poor fish is now swimming around without any bones cursing our boat.
I thank the fishing gods for a wonderful weekend and I can't say enough about the Cabin By The River folks. Top notch!!

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