So here we go again! After a wonderful weekend before in Chelan at the NW fishing reports get together, I had left the Tin Cup at my brother in laws house in Ephrata since I was heading back over on Friday in anticipation of the Sun Lakes resort annual fishing derby held on the Saturday before mothers day.

Now my nephew has placed in the top 3 rankings for the past 4 years so the pressure was on me again to get them into some fish! But we added his younger sister Jordan to the boat so now we were 4~ along with that, my wife mentioned she wanted to participate this year and as luck would have it, her sisters husband Tim Yedinak volunteered to take the two of them on his boat!

We had rented a cabin for Friday night at the resort so I could have the boat in the lake ready for the 8 am starting time and after securing the Tin cup in a slip at the dock, got settled in preparing things for the morning. Of course a fierce wind whipped up but I remembered the same thing happened last year but by the morning had flattened out and the lake was like glass.

Sure enough we woke to a beautiful calm morning so I quickly got down to the boat to get things ready for Scott, Colton and Jordan. I told my wife to wait on the dock for Tim and Tammy as the reception at the camp is spotty and she may miss his call for her to get on the boat.

I had them all get in the boat, did a safety check- made sure we have plenty of water and snacks as the temps were supposed to close to 80 today and set off to find our spot. We chose the same spot we fished last year since we had so much success and anchored in 30 feet of water in my favorite cove. I had them all baited up with orange gulp power bait and at 8 am and yelled CAST!!!

It wasn't long before Coltons pole about jerked out of the rod holder and it was fish on! Landed a fat 16 incher to start the day so things were off to a good start! Soon Tim pulled up and anchored near us and soon we were bantering each other as fish were caught ever 10 minutes or so!

About 9 am though the bite died off and I decided to make a move down the West end of the lake to an area I have done well in years past. We pulled both anchors and motored down the end of the lake with Tim following close behind~ soon we have lines back in the water and then it got crazy!! Was hard to get 4 lines in the water on our boat without a bite and soon we had 14 in the hanging baskets stingers I had purchased for this- my thought was to get the most weight out of these fish was to keep them alive and in the water so these would work best.

Now this is when it gets funny ( you knew this was coming) as we caught our 15th fish I reached down to put it in one of the baskets and just saw a hanging bungie cord which I had used to tether it to the boat! Crap!! Now were at 11 and could only catch 4 more since we had lost 4 and wanted to keep it honest~ We caught 3 more so were now at 13 on the boat and said just for the heck of it lets see if we can snag that basket under the boat. Now realize it could have drifted anywhere as it had 4 live fish in it so Scott and I tied on a #6 blue fox with a treble and put a 1 ounce weight on top of it and tried for 15 minutes dragging the bottom with no luck. Soon I said we need to head in as it is 11:30 and need to make it in for the noon weigh in. Colton asked if he could try and it and we handed to rod to him; he dropped the line down and said I think I got the bottom~ I looked over and could see he had snagged something so slowly started pulling up and wouldn't you know it, we had the basket of fish slowly ascending up out of the depths!~ now granted this was a very light trout rod so we had to go real slow but soon, just like pulling up a crab pot, you could see the basket of fish coming and low and behold, they were still swimming in it too!!

So we headed it with 17 fish and each Colton and Jordan had 5 each so we went to weigh them in. Now in all the confusion, I didn't realize my wife had knocked them dead on Tim's boat so she came walking over with a stringer full too! We all sat back in anticipation of the results and of course, the resort did an amazing job again raising almost $3000 for breast cancer awareness as all the proceeds from this derby go that!! There were 300 less fish caught this year but still a great turnout and I saw one 3.5lb brown trout get weighed and a tiger trout about the same size so wasn't sure of where we would finish.

Well, Colton ended up taking 1st place in the 7-12 year olds category with a 6 lb 10 oz stringer and my wife took 1st place in the adult division with a 6 lb 14 oz stringer!! Jordan of course was crushed but at 9 years old she has 3 more years in this derby to win and Colton moves on to the 13-17 year old division!

So all-in-all another great derby day and many thanks to the wonderful people that run the resort for putting this on each year as it has become a tradition for our family to participate in it for such a great cause!

Now I end up staying over in Eastern WA for a week of fishing so other reports to follow soon!!

See you on the water!!

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