Last Call for Brownlee 2008

First off, I’d like to say thank you to the Idaho Press Tribune for running a piece about Base Camp Legends. I’ve included the jpeg image, above, of the newspaper page because the PDF file was too big – and I’m not in the mood to shrink it! As the weather remains hot, bass fishing has reportedly been slow, but we thought we’d give it a test this weekend.

Todd called me up on Saturday morning and wondered if I’d be interested in heading to Brownlee to see if the catfish were still biting. I figured bass would be slow, but the mention of catfish piqued my interest, and we were off to the very south end of Brownlee. We bounced our way out to Wolf Creek and despite knowing bass fishing would be slow, the lure of these smallies was too much to resist, and we both tied on spinners to see if we could hook into a few. Slow is precisely what it was. We ended up catching a few small bronzebacks and I landed a small largemouth and Todd caught a couple of crappies. Finally, we’d exhausted our bass fishing efforts and decided to try for some catfish – but an hour or so of that netted just one cat – a nice one, at least!

The rate of one fish per hour wasn’t the best, but at least it’s fishin’!

We decided to call it a day, but then as we hoofed it back to the pickup, we noticed a whole bunch of small fish in the shallows and so we got sidetracked and tried to catch them under the theory that where small fish are, big fish are sure to be nearby, too. Todd caught one of the smaller fish, but that got us hooked. We went to chasing these guys all over the reservoir! As we waded out on a big shelf, we noticed a whole bunch of other fish – and then noticed a whole bunch of little pockets that looked like craters on the moon – we were in the middle of some bluegill spawning beds! We backed out and had to call it a day, then. It was interesting because I wasn’t even aware that bluegill lived in Brownlee – and I’d never seen so many spawning beds in my life! More and more, I’m coming to realize that fishing season is going to be winding down for a bit – but I’m not saddened in the least because hunting season will pick up, and for that, I simply cannot wait!

Todd with a smallie.