Rock Lake, Whitman Co.

[Marc Martyn]

Anyone familiar with fly fishing Rock Lake using fast sink line? I have heard that it is a dangerous lake to be on because of the wind. What are some of the do's & don't's on the lake.
I use a South Fork pontoon boat. It is quite stable even in white caps.
Looking at the topo map, I didn't realize that the lake was 300' deep! No wonder why it gets rough.

[littleriver]

I fished it once about 20 years ago from a nominal 16 foot boat with a tiller handle 50 hp outboard.

Got to the NE end of the lake when the wind started blowing hard from the SW....
The run back was very scary because it was a long ways against pounding 3 and 4 foot waves....


Lake is dangerous because of it's size, because it is long and narrow, and because it's physical orientation
tends to maximize the effects of a strong SW wind and when the wind is blowing hard in eastern WA it's
generally from the SW.

I wouldn't be afraid to work it with a pontoon boat as long as you have oars that can move the boat with authority...

Some of the best bass fishing spots in the lake are very close to the boat ramp.....

but I wouldn't let myself go more than half a mile or so from the ramp..... your only real risk using this kind of strategy is the wind coming up from the SW and blowing so hard that you are unable to physically row against it... if that happens, you are in deep doo doo.... and that's why you don't want to be out on this lake in a float tube even if you stay close to the shore and the parking area.....

[Marc Martyn]

Thanks. One of these days I will drive down there and look it over. It seems that the wind always blows in that part of the state.

[jmay]

Rock can get rough in a hurry. I done it in a float tube and its no fun. Using a boat you can run down the lake off of the basalt cliff. I have had succuss with a full sink line stripping line fast with a larger sized Zugbug. Also late in the day with a boatsman special off of a floating line. Again Cast right to the shoreline and strip line fairly fast, the brown in Rock run 14-20 inchs. Its a hell of a lot of fun on my 3 weight

[littleriver]

another thing I forgot to mention in my post about wind and Rock lake is that one also needs to consider currents......


Wind doesn't just make waves it pushes the water it's blowing over... In a shallow lake what happens is the water will bunch
up in the downwind side of the lake raising the lake level there and lowering the level on the upwind side.....

The effects of a steady, but not necessarily strong, wind can be quite remarkable.. anyone who's spent any time hanging around Niagara Falls NY has probably seen the pictures from the late 1800s when the falls went completely dry...... the area had experienced a strong, steady easterly wind for a week or so and this wind literally pushed the lake water west and the falls went dry............. the idiots who went out to walk across the dry rock at the top of the falls probably felt like they were Moses crossing the Red Sea with Ramses and his soldiers in hot pursuit...


However, in a deep lake what will happen is the water level will adjust by creating a strong current down deep where the wind can't get to that's moving in the opposite direction of the wind....... definitely something to take into account if you are running a small boat on Rock Lake with a small outboard or rowing... because if you plan on coming in against the wind you will be working against both wind and current.. .Rock is very deep and I'm sure this current sets up everytime you have a strong wind there.....

also something to consider if you are in a big boat fishing deep off of downriggers on a windy day......... the effective speed of your boat in this case can be vastly different than the effective speed of your lure if the downrigger ball is in the "down deep currrent" that's moving water back to the upwind side of the lake for hydraulic balance.......

[Wilkstr]

Rock can get rough in a hurry. I done it in a float tube and its no fun. Using a boat you can run down the lake off of the basalt cliff. I have had succuss with a full sink line stripping line fast with a larger sized Zugbug. Also late in the day with a boatsman special off of a floating line. Again Cast right to the shoreline and strip line fairly fast, the brown in Rock run 14-20 inchs. Its a hell of a lot of fun on my 3 weight

The year before I moved to Rock they missed the state record brown by not much... Jmay, you are correct that lake can get scary, as I said in a different post, that lake claimed the life of a friend of mine.