Fishing Lake Tahoe, its for the birds!

Good morning from Salt Lake City. Yes, I changed plans again. Instead of driving all the way up to Jackson, Wyoming yesterday I decided to go fishing on Lake Tahoe early, then shorten the day's drive by only going as far as Salt Lake City. I found a guide that would do a three hour charter and would start early, leaving most of the day free for a drive.

Now before you nonfisherpeople bail out on this episode because you don't care about fishing, please hang in there because this is not the typical 'fish story'.

I got lucky when I found Captain Jeff Wakefield of First Strike Sportfishing. He was professional, personable, knowledgeable, and c0mpletely unflappable. He had me meet him at 5:15am. It was still dark and very cold, in the low 30's. I sat on the pier looking at the stars while Jeff took the dinghy out to get the fishing boat. I could clearly see all the stars of The Big Dipper, The Little Dipper, and the constellation Orion. We were on the water by about 6am, still well before sunrise.

We were fishing for lake trout, and they were deep. Jeff had told me there were two ways to catch them. We could jig (bounce the bait up and down over one spot) or troll (drag the bait around behind the boat going about one to two miles per hour). What made this interesting was that the fish were 120 to 160 feet deep. For those who have trouble imagining depths, think of it as the equivalent of a 12 to 16 story building, but going down into the water instead of up into the air.

Because I had never jigged that deep before and because in jigging you have the fishing rod in your hand when the fish hit I chose to start jigging. Captain Jeff put us right above the fish and we started jigging. Our rig was a heavy spoon-shaped jig with a treble hook followed by a stinger hook that held a small minnow. We dropped the jig to 120 feet and started lifting it quickly up about 4 feet, then letting in flutter back down. In jigging you do this over and over and over again.

I lost the first fish that hit because I was not prepared for what the strike would feel like. You just feel additional weight when you lift the rod as part of the jigging motion. The next five fish weren't so lucky.




Daylight broke and we were able to see that we had the entire lake to ourselves. Lake Tahoe is surrounded by mountains and even though I was concentrating on catching fish, I still took time to watch the lake slowly emerge from the darkness into the dawn, and then into a magnificent morning.

After catching five fish jigging, I asked if we could switch to trolling. Jeff hooked up two rods to the downriggers and we started trolling around. A downrigger is a 10 to 15 pound metal ball that is raised and lowered by an electric hoist. The line gets attached to the downrigger by a clamp. The purpose is to get the bait lowered to the depth of the fish. The boat then drags the downrigger and the bait around and you just sit back and wait for a fish to hit. It is a nice combination of a boat ride and fishing. In the picture below you can see the rod is in a rod holder and the rod is bent because the line is attached to the down rigger and all of the slack line is reeled up until the rod is bent.

As you can seebelow we caught a nice lake trout by trolling.

At this point the story gets a bit bizzare. Often times seagulls follow the boat hoping to pick up any minnows that come off the hook in the course of the angler fighting the fish.

After I had caught the first fish trolling, Jeff put another minnow on the hook, put the line in the water, and went to lower the downrigger. But before he could drop the downrigger a seagull grabbed the minnow. Jeff went ahead and lowered the downrigger. He took the bird down 30 feet into the water (the equivalent of 3 stories). At that point we realized that the bird wouldn't or couldn't let go of the minnow, so he reversed the winch and pulled the seagull back up to the surface. The poor bird was hooked in both the upper and lower beak. Jeff reeled the bird into the boat.

He was able to safely remove the hooks. We decided that neither one of knew what the bag limit was for seagulls, how to clean one, or any good seagull recipies, so he let it go. The seagull flew off, relatively unharmed and hopefully a bit smarter. I was impressed by the way Jeff handled both the situation and the bird. He was as gentle as he could be with the seagull but didn't get flustered at all by having to handle a flapping unhappy bird.

We caught one more laker trolling before we called in a great morning of fishing and headed back to the pier. I was on the road to Salt Lake City by 10am.

I hesitated before deciding to share with all of you the next part of this narrative. As I was driving across northern Nevada I was listening to some music and thinking how nice it was to have the freedom to decide at the last minute to change my travel plans. Then the Janis Joplin song 'Me and Bobby McGee' came on. It's a song about a lost relationship. But one line in the song hit me hard. She sings "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose". That got me thinking (I hate it when that happens).

I was thinking that the only reason I have the freedom to drive around the country and change plans on a whim is because I have lost Cindy, so there is really nobody counting on me for anything, and I really have nothing left to lose. And I was really starting to feel sorry for myself...... until I thought of all of you. All of you who are reading this blog are important to me. Family, friends, former co-workers, business associates, my church small group, every one of you has helped keep me going. And I thank you. Your comments posted on this blog, your emails, and your phone calls have kept me going. Your love, your friendship, and your support has given me a richer life than I deserve and I realized just how much I have been truly blessed. Dang, I don't know how to end this moment.


My next blog will be from Wyoming, unless I change plans again (which I have the freedom to do)