5-15 SS Bass and Pike

 Bass and Pike fishing in the Northwest. Not often ballyhooed by all the flyfishing crowd, but lots and lots of fun and will hear about it next.

 I thought for a minute I was going to have to turn my hearing aid up when I called Josh Mills, flyfishing genius who spends a vast portion of his life in waders looking for steelhead, Trout etc. However, without any prompting from me he actually brought up fishing for bass and pike. “As spring progresses and the water starts to warm up, I’m not the most competent bass angler but, I do know that we are going to start getting to a high level of activity, pre-spawn activity, for fish that are in the spiny rig category: smallmouth, largemouth, Pike. In Northeast Washington there is quite a fishery going on right now with Pike which is up by us on the Pend Oreille River. From what I understand the magic number is somewhere around 45 to 50° in that water and they start to heat up and start to turn the bite on. But fly anglers and gear anglers alike have been doing extremely well up there and  they are going to try and manage that fishery for a trophy pike fishery and they are lifting a lot of the bag limits. So go up there and catch a mass of pike because the numbers are good but they are a little stunted in their size. You might catch a few of what are called hammer handles which are 5 to 10 pound fish but occasionally you could get into a 30 pounder, you never know.