Northwest Fishing Reports

Merwin Lake is a hydropower reservoir located about 35 air miles northwest of Portland on the North Fork of the Lewis River, which flows 93 miles from Mt. Adams to the Columbia River. The lower reach of this river is an important migratory salmon and steelhead stream and endangered bull trout inhabi...

I haven't been to Mayfield recently, and things are always changing there, so there may well be a bunch of trees in the water right now. Winter rains bring them down from the slopes above the water. From our point of view as muskie anglers, trees are good because they provide cover for tiger muskies...

Evergreen Reservoir is an irrigation holding tank located about 3 miles northwest of George on I-90 in the Quincy Wildlife Area, which contains several popular fishing lakes and is jointly managed by the state Department of Natural Resources and the federal Bureau of Reclamation. Water is retained i...

This small irrigation runoff impoundment a few miles south of Potholes was stocked with tiger muskies, but after reading this report you'll probably conclude it's not worth fishing (for muskies, anyway) as it's extremely unlikely there are still any tiger muskies here. Red Rock Lake is a natural cor...

In order to organize this board more coherently, I think it'll be useful to have a separate thread for each of our tiger musky lakes. I'll start it off by posting some of my file information on Mayfield Lake. Mayfield Lake is a hydropower reservoir on the Cowlitz River. Mayfield Dam is owned by Taco...

I forgot to mention -- the way you report the data is, once a year, in the winter off-season, you mail the completed diary pages back to WDFW in a postage prepaid envelope they provide, and they mail you a new set of blank pages. I report not only my muskie fishing days, but all my fishing, includin...

WDFW Warmwater Fisheries has a program that collects fishing data from anglers. They send you a little book with blank pages in it, in which you record information. The data they're seeking consists of: The date you fished. The name of the lake where you fished. The species you fished for. How many ...

The hatchery doesn't have a certified scale, and it's half an hour to town. A 30 lb. muskie wouldn't last that long in my livewell. Personally, I hope the state record will be passe by this time next year; I've submitted a rule proposal to the F & W Commission to change the tiger muskie bag limit to...

Yeah, it does that to people. Muskies are worse than crack. I have no answer. There's no known cure.

Same time as Merwin. These two reservoirs are only a few miles from each other, so they get the same weather; and they have identical physical characteristics -- they're at the same elevation, both are river canyon impoundments about 190 feet deep with similar underwater topography, and are fed by s...

What makes you think we don't have skeeters? Apparently you haven't fished Evergreen Reservoir in summer yet.

There's a fishing tackle store in my area called Angler's Choice, 20222 Ballinger Way NE, Shoreline, WA 98155. He specializes in bass fishing is an authorized MinnKota repair station. If you mail him one with a note asking him to display it, I bet he would. I've let Mike and Tony, and also our frien...

It's too early to be fishing Merwin. They're still in their winter haunts, laying dormant on the bottom in deep water. They won't be catchable until mid to late June.

Yes, I think it's a good thing for tiger musky anglers in Washington to get organized and get involved with issues involving the management of this fishery, such as stocking and catch regulations. The bass and walleye anglers are well organized, and not all of them are on your side where muskies are...

I have several responses to comments in this thread. Re live bait: You can't use live fish for bait in Washington. And muskies, unlike northern pike, won't take dead fish. So we're pretty much dead in the water where bait is concerned, and Washington's tiger musky fishery is a 100% artificial lure f...

I'm also primarily a bucktail guy and I happen to like Musky Busters because they have thick blades which enable me to fish them deep. If you are using baits with soft plastic tails, yes, they will get chewed up. The cement that sticks to that plastic is PVC pipe cement used by plumbers which you ca...

Yup, if you look closely at the photo credit on the table of contents page, you'll see that I provided F&HN with the photo they used on the cover. The way that came about is F&HN contacted WDFW to get some musky photos, but they didn't have any fishing photos. The warmwater fisheries people at WDFW ...

littleriver, I stand by what I said about the big U.S. nuclear contractors. There have been problems with records falsification, inspectors finding faulty construction, unsafe reactor operation, and so on. We've had accidents in this country, albeit nothing on the scale of Chernobyl. Nuclear waste i...

My last post dropped part of a sentence. It should read: "Here's what's behind the rightwing propaganda about "Gore's private jets." During the 2000 presidential primaries, Gore made several trips on private corporate jets to roughly a dozen campaign appearances in New Hampshire and other Northeast ...

No muskyhunter, I don't buy the natural cycles argument, and neither should anyone else. That argument can be debunked in a few seconds. Natural climate cycles occur over a span of thousands of years. Temperatures have been measured with instruments and recorded for about 150 years , and scientists ...