Hiked the tube up into Smelling for the first time this past weekend for some C&R and had a pretty good two and a half hours of afternoon fishing on the lake. I'm continuing to work on my still water fly fishing skills, and this was definitely a great lake for practice due to the numbers of very willing, if not relatively small, cutthroat. All fish that I caught today were probably around the 7" to 9" mark. Quick caution note to others who may decide to check the lake out, you really need some sort of flotation device to best fish the lake. It isn't impossible to cast from shore, but you will be pretty limited due to shoreline cover and downed trees which ring the entire lake. After inflating the tube I began kicking around the shoreline while using a dark brown bead head woolly bugger I had tied up. I was using my 3wt with a floating line and probably about a 10 foot leader. The strategy was pretty simple, cast into the shallows, let the fly sink for maybe 5 to 15 seconds, and then begin a slow/moderate paced strip. This worked pretty well as I got more taps than I can remember and ended up landing 8 fish with a number of other hookups. The sink and strip method wasn't the only one I used, but it is what I settled on as being the best. I will also note, I had considerably more success in the locations on the lake where I could cast pretty close to shore, rather than casting towards floating logs that were, say, 30' away from shore. I think this is a direct result of the fact that the lake gets very deep very quick, and I was simply in too deep of water in locations where the timber kept me from close shore access.

Eventually I lost the bugger and decided to give my spinning rod a try. The fish were all over a 1/16oz Roostertail (gold blade, greenbody) and I proceeded to land four more in short order. WDFW notes that this lake is 107 feet deep, but it is only about 7 acres in size. As such, I wanted to drop my gear down into the depths and see if anything happened. Putting on extra weight I let the same Roostertail sink all the way to the bottom on a number of casts and then brought it up slowly. Nothing happened, which is what I figured would probably be the case, but I was curious just to give it a shot. Nice lake, nice setting and willing fish. If only they were just a couple inches bigger on average!

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