No disappointments from Brewster. Due to a three fish sockeye limit, I decided to gather up the whole family and head up to Lake Pateros. We have had health scares with both of my folks this year. I realized I'm not going to always have them around, and asked them to join us. We arrived at the "pool" around 7 pm Saturday. My daughter is just shy of 4 years and made a great attempt at the first hookup. This resulted in a lost fish. Since we were on a meat run I decided she wasn't going to get any special treatment. It was every man for themselves. My wife lost our second fish shortly after the first. I was expecting the bite to break loose, but it died for us for about an hour. About the time the sun went down things finally went crazy. For the next 30 minutes we were hooking 2-3 fish at a time. It was all we could do to keep 2 of our 5 rods in the water. My daughter eventually latched on to another phsyco sockeye and winched it in a half crank at a time. I was fearful of loosing a good pole, but was carefully to let her complete this task by herself since she is now carrying her own punch card. When the fishing is hot at Brewster, relaxing is not a word I would use to describe it. Between landing fish, baiting rods, filling out catch cards, and dodging boats, it can be a real circus. That evening we landed 8, and probably lost 5 more.

Sunday morning we reached the fishing grounds around 5:30am. The bite was awesome right off the bat, and again things got crazy. One would think that keeping track of a three fish limit would prove to be easy. We lost track many times, but were very careful to get an accurate recount often. After each one of us managed a limit we would retire a pole. Soon only my daughter was left with one more fish to catch. We decided to give it a 30 minute limit and bail for home. 5 minutes later she settled back into the fighting chair, battling a half crank at a time. Standing on the swim platform I was just about to net her 4th sockeye (of the 2 day trip) only to watch it spit the hook and swim away. Oh well. What a great trip I got to share with my family and folks. This is the kind of crazy I'm happy to deal with. Now it's time to relax and smoke up our 22 sockeye.

For those of you hanging in there, here are some specifics. Short leaders behind an 0 dodger. Trolled .9-1.4 mph. We mostly trolled my shrimp pattern flies which I now have 2 colors for sale. Of course baits were tipped with shrimp and fished about 15-17 feet deep. I have to say everybody was in great spirits, and it was a little easier fishing since everyone was trolling the same basic speed( due to chinook closure ). I will inject some boating etiquette here. Don't be a self-centered idiot. If you cross at 90 degrees in front of another boat don't act like an entitled jay walker that owns the place. You should show some respect, throttle up and get out of the way as if you were about to get mowed down by a semi truck. It amazes me at how many anglers feel that their boat only has one speed and not hell or high water will force them to change. Brewster can be a real circus, but for me it functions a lot smoother if I just pay attention and once in a while make necessary speed changes to help out with the organized chaos. Some times I have to kick it in neutral and wait for a gap, and other times I have to speed up to make someone a gap or to just get out of the way. I hope if I offended anybody this weekend it was because we were fighting 3 fish and I was trying to steer my tiller backwards and between my legs and netting fish at the same time.

Good luck to you all, and remember take your loved ones fishing, and not for granted.

PS feel free to contact me if you want to purchase some flies. I only have orange and fuchsia available at this time.

-captain dave

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