I really dont like to do Secret Lake posts. If I could trust that all forum members were ethical, I wouldn't. But having seen a forum member blatantly snagging coho, and then still snagging when he hit his limit of snagged fish? For the sake of certain fisheries, I think Secret Lake is best.

That being said, today was a magical day. I'm not the sort of man who uses terms like magical, but I really can't think of a better way to describe it.

My day actually started very, very early. I was dragged out to a dance club last night by my friends and didn't get home until after 3am. I was meeting Mr. B at the park and ride at 6:15. Ok no worries, I'm not a little baby, I can handle this, so I get my phone out to set the timer to 5:30 and ... my phone wont turn on. I look over at my alarm clock, suddenly remembering that it is broken and I never replaced it. Being of sound mind, I turn on my computer and send Mr. B a forum message!

I plug my phone into the computer to see if it will charge, and it turns on. And then turns off. And then turns on, and turns off. Over and over.

With a sigh, I leave it cycling on and off and go to bed. "you must be up in 90 minutes, you can only sleep for 90 minutes" I keep repeating until .... I open my eyes. I get up and see the phone is not cycling any more. I turn it on ... it's on, and it's 5:15 am. Sweet! Go go internal alarm clock successfully going off in 90 minutes! I set my phone alarm for 5:45 and go back to sleep haha.

So I'm up at 5:45, and I'm dragging. It's bad. I send Mr. B a message that I'm going to be late. No response. I eventually get to the park and ride at 6:38. I'm 23 minutes late. Still with no response, I call Mr. B and .... HAHAHAHAHAHA I wake him up! After all that making fun of his buddy for sleeping in yesterday and missing the trip to Lost Lake, he does the same thing today! He says he'll be there in 45 minutes. No problem I tell him, and promptly fall asleep. I wake to his phone call that he's there. We pack up and off we go. Our 6:15 departure has become 7:45, but obstacles overcome, we're on our way. By the way, when I left the house, it was RAINING. It wasn't fooling around. And when I woke up in the car? It was still raining just as hard! Fortunately we have a pretty easy hike planned today, and shore fisihing.

We park at the gate and by some miracle the rain calms down, and then stops! An easy stroll through the woods later we arrive at the lake. This lake is much more shallow, so instead of worm on bottom we're going worm on bobber. Snag immune, and in this lake, same depth presentation. Mr. B is rigged up and starts fishing. Foolishly, I am not rigged up. I throw on a Castmaster really fast. Something huge rises right in front of us. Last time here, I had a first cast fish on and it was a beauty. I go with my fav 3/8ths perch pattern Castmaster for max range, cast out, and ... BAM fish on! Sweeeeet! I talk trash to Mr. B ..... as usual, prize for first fish (our prizes are just trash talk rights) goes to me! And it's a great fish. Solid 12+ inches.

There's been a couple more massive risers. A couple casts in that general direction and ... damn, my lure stops and I set the hook anyway. Bad call. My fav Castmaster just drilled into a snag. I sigh. THEN THE SNAG SHAKES IT'S HEAD. It's my thicker rod, with 12 pound test, and the bend in it is HUGE. It still looks like I'm pulling on a snag, only the snag is bouncing! My comment, probably yelled, is not repeatable here. Mr. B looks over from his position 40 feet down the shore, and his reaction to seeing my rod bent like that ... also not repeatable on this forum.

There is a bit of a battle, but long story short, look at the picture. I had just caught a coho, in a little shallow lake, out in the middle of the woods. Now we didn't have to speculate what those huge risers we'd been seeing were. We knew that salmon were in the creek leading to this lake, as we'd seen them in the past. And we knew that the lake had really nice cutts in it, which I had already proven. But to catch a salmon, in the lake, and have it actually HIT the Castmaster? (Castmaster clearly visible under blade of grass in pic) We MIGHT have done a little victory dance. I mentioned that we had been at the lake 15 minutes and could quite legitimately just declare victory and leave, and really, no one would be able to argue the point. Needless to say, we most certainly did NOT declare victory and leave. We thanked the Fish Gods and got right back to casting!

We talked about the fate of the coho. It was about half colored ... as seen in the pic, it's red on the back, but very much not red between the back and the blush on the gill plate. Certainly not fire truck red. Mr. B declared it would still be edible with that amount of coloration. And due to our delicious lunch the day before, this time we came prepared to cook with my mini propane stove. Having absolutely fresh salmon on the shore of a subalpine lake, out in the woods in the middle of nowhere ... that has a "special memory" rating of maximum, on whatever scale you choose to employ. Quite possibly a rating of "once in a lifetime". Careful examination of the fish showed it still firm. No overt signs of deterioration. But as I was looking at how it was hooked, I noticed 3 weird looking growths inside its mouth. I've seen a lot of coho as a kid. I had never seen such. Mr. B took a look and suggested it could be something called tapioca disease, and if that was the case, the already potentially suspect meat could be completely ruined and we would have slaughtered a gorgeous fish for nothing. Discretion being the better part of hunger (we had half of our planned cutt lunch already after less than 15 minutes of trying), we sent the coho back into the lake to make babies.

At this point I felt it was more than justified to stop casting and set up my bobber, which I did. After all, I had already won first fish, most likely locked in biggest fish with ... let's say a 3-4 pound coho. And we were having an awesome time, immediately upon lake arrival, AND we weren't getting rained on!

The exact order of things is a blur, but I think Mr. B caught a cutt on a spinner, then another on the bobber and worm, then one flycasting. At some point I caught another cutt, and then Mr. B caught another cutt, putting him to 4. His were just monsters, all in the 13+ to low 14 range. I picked up his stringer of 4 fish and it was just absurdly heavy for a 4 cutt stringer. During this time, Mr. B had 2 MONSTER bites, both of which rolled and spit the hook. He said he saw the flashes when they rolled and both were clearly cohos sized. I had one go full on Jaws that was clearly a coho. I saw something overtake my spoon about 10 feet off shore at high speed and hit, miss, and turn. Flashed clearly a 16-20 inch fish, so surely a coho. The spoon was maybe 10 inches down, and when I saw the hit I started, then aborted, setting the hook, so the spoon was dragging on the surface as I reeled. Then, have you seen the videos of the guys using the bass surface lures to catch coho? Just like that, shoulders pushing a wake on the surface, the fish charged the lure one more time maybe 7 feet off shore, struck again, and missed again. I was sad it didn't hook up, but man, what an amazing thing to see in person. Again, in a little tiny lake up in the woods in the middle of nowhere. We both caught and released one or two little cutts (in this lake, anything under 11 is "little" and we throw it back), it was maybe 1pm, and the bite had REALLY slowed down. A coho would rise periodically and we would cast at it, but they were now ignoring us.

I eventually did catch a 4th, on the worm and bobber. It was my biggest. I tried a silver Vibrax for a while when they entirely stopped hitting my Castmaster. The ignored it also. Eventually I went to my last resort lure, the ridiculous clown lure I sometimes deploy in Greenlake. Much to the irritation of Mr. B, that was how I caught my last fish haha. I ended the day with two nice cutts, 13+ inch, and 3 smaller ones in the 11-13 range. Mr. B ended the day with a much bigger lineup. In the second pic, taken when we stopped for lunch after I limited and Mr. B had bonked 4 since we were about to eat two of them, his are on the top and mine are on the bottom. But there were no losers today, despite our contests. In reality, I'm like Mr. B's 3rd arm. I'm an extension of his knowledge, with just a few tweaks of my own. So Team Us scored two limits of cutts kept with one fish 11 inches and the rest 12-14+, one coho landed, and 3 legitimate coho strikes that weren't landed. We caught fish flycasting, on spoons, on spinners, and on bait. The sun came out quite a bit and we didn't get cold. The rain was only two brief sprinkles, compared to the usual full on torrential downpour it usually does on us. And we ate delicious native subalipine cutthroat trout on the shore for lunch. AND we left early and got back to the cars BEFORE dark!!!!

I thought the brook trout experience two weeks ago would be a 2014 high for awesome. Perhaps a multi-year high. But as it turned out, I only needed to wait two weeks for the Fickle Lady Fate to remind me that SHE is the one who makes that decision!

As usual, if you somehow recognize our location, please respect our choice to Secret Lake this report.

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