Quail Lake, Washington

November 17, 2016

Parking area at Herman Lake.  If you don't find this pretty you need to get your eyes checked.  

Early this morning Cheryl took the kids (there are three of them now) to Utah to spend the week with our families. I had today off, but need to work until Thanksgiving day when I will fly down and join them.  Because I had to be back in town for a meeting at five, I chose to hit a lake closer to home, so I decided on Quail.

All 12 acres of Quail Lake.

This would be my fourth time this year fishing Quail.  The lake is small, fertile, and is managed as fly-fishing only and catch and release only.  They don't stock too many fish, but the ones that they do grow to a good size.  I've never caught more than three fish in one day at Quail.  I would have almost exactly four hours to fish, so my goal was to catch four fish.

The first hour I stripped my trusty olive leech pattern fast, slow, deep, shallow, in shallow water, in deep water (Quail gets over 40 feet deep!) and never touched a fish.  I decided to change up and try fishing under an indicator with a chironomid and a balanced leech/damsel.   Fishing about 16 ft down over 25 feet of water, after about ten minutes I had my first take down!  Fighting the strong fish on my 3 wt was a riot (Cheryl took my 6 wt to Utah for some Thanksgiving action hopefully).  He made multiple strong runs, which sent my reel singing.  Finally I landed a beautiful 18" tubby rainbow.

The fish and the tools used to fool him!

He's a big dude!

I stayed in the same area and tried to repeat my success for another half hour or so, but nothing panned out.  I then decided to try the middle of the cove on the North East side of the lake.  The fish finder showed weeds throughout most of the lake, but most of the middle of that cove has a clean, likely mucky bottom in 16-20 ft of water.  I thought that was curious.  I really started paying attention after I got my first take down within ten minutes of moving to this area!

Hefty 17" rainbow.  It fought like a champ!

I had to adjust my flies to stay just off the bottom, but in the next two hours I lost another nice fish after a prolonged fight (my slip indicator wouldn't slip, and I couldn't net him) and caught a 16.5", another 17", and a little 11" rainbow.  The action stayed pretty consistent.  I never caught fish back to back, but I didn't have to wait forever either.

Chunky 16.5".  Cookie cutters this size aren't annoying at all!

Eventually my time to leave came and I had to head home.  In all, I had six indicator takedowns and I landed five fish, battling the other for a handful of runs.  I reached my goal, and got to spend a magnificent, if a bit chilly, late fall day on the water.  Can't beat that.