Willow Bark and Rainbows

March can be a great month for river-run rainbows. I've learned to look for the color of rust on the willow branches for a cue to good fishing. That's when you go to the river because that's when rainbow trout head upstream ahead of the murky water.

From left to right, Thomas Mackey, Justin Figgins and Kyle Cady, all Bonners Ferry men, found their way to the Clark Fork River on just the right day. These are all hen rainbows. The limit is two each so Kyle still had one to go; and they weren't done yet when I happened upon them for this photo op.

These are Gerrard Rainbows from Pend Oreille Lake caught in the act of heading up to spawn. Just like sea-run steelhead on the Clearwater River, these fine fish fell prey to roe (fish eggs) fished along the bottom on a drift.

I guessed the food value of their catch at around $120 by weight in a food mart. You'll find no better food fish than these this time of year. Catch and release is a good practice in heavily fished waters, but the predator population on Pend Oreille is under tight management. So this year, Idaho Fish & Game placed a moratorium on lake-run rainbows to encourage harvest of adult fish. Both rainbows and lake trout are known to feed heavily on the dwindling population of Kokanee still resident in the lake.

The spring run of rainbows has nothing to do with the color of willow bark except both are natural responses to warmer weather and increased length of day. The water is up in rivers because of snow-melt and spring rains. The sap is up in the willows for the same reason. Higher, silted-water acts as a stimulate for egg-laden rainbow hens and their compliment of males to move out of the lake into the spawning streams. It makes sense. The water is deeper. Larger fish can go higher up to the better spawning gravels and return before the spring run-off drops to prohibitive levels. This water flux is good for the young fry as well because it means they'll have fewer predatory fish to contend with while they grow.

As for the willows seen in this background shot of the lower Clark Fork River, that purplish rust-brown color you see on the willow branches at water's edge is a cue to my inner being. I spent many days in my youth fishing March water and that's the only time of year you'll see that color without leaves. Like trout drawn to highwater, I'm coaxed by the color of willow bark just before the leaves pop out. Later the water will get higher and muddier before subsiding for summer, so this is the time to go.

I watched from shore as they caught the largest of this day's catch. What a pleasure! That's them in the boat. Look carefully about fifteen feet in front of their bow. You can see the head of Thomas' 25-inch fish as she came out of the water on tight line.

Hmmmnn...willow bark and rainbows.

###Dwayne K. Parsons

A Brown in Pend Oreille?

When people talk about the fish and fishing in Lake Pend Oreille, they usually talk about the outsized Rainbow Trout, the Gerrard Rainbows imported into these waters from a longer-living Canadian strain. They also, now, talk about the voracious Mackinaw, or Lake Trout, that got into these waters some fifty years ago and have grown sight unseen in deeper waters until within the last ten years or so they started showing up on the ends of fishing rods.

Both trout species are notorious predators and according to Idaho Fish & Game. Fish biologists that have conducted many lengthy studies hoping to restore the once-famous Kokanee fishing on these waters. Kokanee (locally once called Bluebacks) are a variety of landlocked sockeye salmon. Kokanee were not always here either. The first in this lake were caught handlining for Lake Whitefish, dropping a heavy sinker into deep water with a maggot or two barbed to a small hook six inches off the bottom and jigging by hand without rod. Those early birds didn't know what they were catching but knew they sure tasted good! They called them Bluebacks in lieu of their spring and summer colors. When these prolific fish started showing up in great numbers (by the mid-to-late 40s, there were millions of these fish in the lake averaging 11-inches in length), they were fished commercially and had become the main food source of humongous trout.

Of late, the large rainbows and the Mackinaw, the latter in particular have been labelled as the culprits in the food chain that could drop the Kokanee of Lake Pend Oreille off the map in a population collapse. Long story here with many tangents...I could go on and on and on.

But nobody talks about or even broaches the subject of Brown Trout in Lake Pend Oreille and yet the Clark Fork River, which flows into the lake, is full of them above the Cabinet Gorge Dam. Seems a few have gone through the spillway. This 30-inch brown trout, coveted by you and me but taken by George Hendrix was caught in the second week of March off an unnamed point casting small brassy spoons from shore. It's a bonafide Salmo Trutta alright. Thirty inches in length and weighing a winter-lite eight and a half pounds. Whew! Where'd she come from?

"Nice goin', George. Say...next time you head out...if you have room...would you mind...you know...taking me along?"

###Dwayne K. Parsons

Just Under the Ice

When the shallow bays look like farm fields, what do you do but bore a hole in the ice and while away the time catching perch? That's what most of us do, but a few innovative fishermen go after the larger, and yes, tastier, lake whitefish seen in this photograph of young Hunter Hendrix showing off his Dad's fresh winter catch.

Long-time North Idaho fisherman, George Hendrix, caught these in early February fishing a large flat of ice over the shallows off Sunnyside on the east end of Pend d'Oreille Bay, Lake Pend Oreille.

The bay, full of perch that time of year, retains the original French spelling, though history has dropped the small-case d' in favor of simpler spelling from North Idaho's now famous and certainly largest natural body of water, Lake Pend Oreille. Despite the fact that Lake Pend Oreille has a dam down river at Albani Falls, just east of the Washington State line, it still qualifies as a natural lake because the dam serves to regulate the potential of flooding while generating a significant amount of energy for the Pacific Northwest.

These whitefish are Lake Superiors, planted in Lake Pend Oreille in the early 1900s as a food fish. For the most part, they inhabit deep water and are seldom sought by area fishermen. They are larger than the more common Mountain Whitefish which also inhabit this lake system. Though these fish are roughly a pound to a pound and a half, many will gain weight to five or six pounds and for the most part inhabit depths of 90-feet or greater. In the winter and spring, however, as George has learned, they come into the shallower waters to feed on the large mayfly nymph known to trout fishermen in this bay. These whitefish were "stuffed, literally stuffed" according to George who saved a few samples for the record. The nymph lying next to this pencil was one taken from the stomach of one of these whitefish.

George told me he caught the whitefish "jigging hard and fast just three inches below the ice cover." Thanks, George, for showing us this incredible food fish can be caught when the winter months are dragging on.

### Dwayne K. Parsons