The Fishin' Magician: Birthday fishing on Fish Lake

My wife Eileen's birthday wish was to run up to Fish Lake, near Lake Wenatchee, and spend the afternoon fly fishing for rainbow. This is one of our favorite fall activities. The fall foliage is in bloom and the lake is full of hungry rainbow.

After launching at the Cove Resort and a very short run out onto the main lake, I put out two rods. One had a "triploid" fly on it. It was a large black leech with a lot of blue flashabou in the pattern, and a Wiggle Fin Action Disk on the head of the fly. The other was a tried and true bead-head Bugger I have used here before with great success.

Fishing started off slow, so I changed the bead-head Bugger to a small sculpin pattern, with a bullet head with a red eye. That did the trick. We immediately began getting strikes on the new fly. This fly was on a 3-weight rod with a sink tip line. The other was on a 5-weight rod with an intermediate sinking line. Soon both rods were going off regularly.

We lost count of how many fish we caught and released, and found good numbers of 10- to 12-inch rainbow at the bottom and top ends of the lake.