Spinyrays in the northern forest.
Sandpoint, Idaho—Calvin Fuller has a pet bass that weighs a pound and a half and eats chicken burritos. He hooks it during lunch breaks less than a block from Sandpoint, Idaho’s main drag, under the watchful eyes of coffee-sippers at Starbucks.
Fuller, a local outfitter who operates the area’s only fly shop, cuts between storefronts and down an alley to reach the banks of Sand Creek, then casts a bug-eye streamer. I watch the fat line he’s throwing off a Sage Bass Series rod and it goes tight. He and his pet play again.
A few years ago Sandpoint earned kudos as one of the West’s top fly-fishing communities, despite its distance from north Idaho’s premier trout fisheries, the St. Joe and Coeur d’Alene rivers. Instead of trout water, the midsize community of 9,000 is edged by Sand Creek, a brush-rimmed smallmouth spawning stream that slides quietly under a boutique mall, past a menagerie of boat slips and through the shadows of a railroad bridge and a new highway bypass. From there it melds with Lake Pend Oreille’s 148 square miles of bucolic blue, at City Beach, where a worm fisherman caught a 12-pound rainbow last spring. Fuller landed his biggest bull trout, largemouth bass and smallmouth bass within shouting distance of the harbor. If it weren’t for the fly-fishing, he says, he would be somewhere else.
That may surprise you—and even locals—because most anglers in this logging and tourist town, located an hour north of Coeur d’Alene, cast a traditional dry fly for trout instead of focusing on the area’s best option, those largemouth and smallmouth bass. Fuller and his band of fish-heads, in contrast, spend so much time stripping line in the sloughs and backwaters of the Pend Orielle River, and over the green-water gravel and rock bars of the state’s biggest and deepest lake, their fingers have calluses usually reserved for bluegrass pickers.
“You want numbers, or do you want size?” Fuller asks a new client at his shop with a sweet tooth for smallies. “If you want numbers, I can you hook you up all day. If you want size I’ve got a couple sweet spots.”
Back on the water, this time in a 16-foot boat that looks like a strip of sparkle yarn, Fuller guns the 115-horse Evinrude. We shoot from Trestle Creek, east of town, to the riprap along the Pack River Delta, then around Sunnyside Peninsula and on west to the Pend Oreille River, with its bucket sloughs and weedy banks, all dotted with the skeletons of Styrofoam worm containers. Fuller cuts the engine at each bass haunt and as the boat lurches in its backwash the morning is again filled with quiet. Fuller drops an electric motor affixed to the bow and starts casting. It won’t take long.
According to Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game, this is a developing fishery that has “really come on” in the past few years. A recent survey counted scads of bass, several bigger than nine pounds, between the Long Bridge—a Sandpoint landmark—and a point downstream on the Pend Oreille River. Fuller, talking like a man with a plan, said, “There are three state records in that stretch. And they like flies.”
Introduced unintentionally in the late 1990s, when a high-water event pushed them over an upstream dam and into the lake, Pend Oreille’s smallmouth are widespread from Sandpoint on the lake’s north end to Bayview, 50 miles south. Most of the fish are small, but there are decent numbers that stretch to several pounds. The area’s largemouth are mostly found in the river below Long Bridge, where sloughs stretch their weedy tongues into sandbars like sniffing serpents.
Fuller and a friend, Sam Wike, bump bunny-tails off the docks below monumental homes on the Pend Oreille River. It is early. They have been at it since 5:00 a.m., and homeowners on massive decks wear bathrobes and warm their hands on coffee cups as they watch the two cast. A boil erupts at the end of Wike’s line. He sets hard and misses. He yelps, “That was a huge smallmouth! That was a toad!”
At 10:30 they break for beer and bisque at MickDuff’s, a downtown brewery that’s a short walk from the dock. As the boat glides up Sand Creek, past shop windows and boogie-board tri-hulls, still covered and tied fast to their moorings, Fuller tells about his pet bass.
“It’s a genteel fish,” he says, “with an appetite for streamers and pieces of the burritos sold down the street [at Joel’s Mexican Restaurant].” Fuller says his pet bass has the clockwork appetite of a gourmand and expects to be fed. Wike adds, “This is pretty urban fly-fishing right here,” as he bounces a Keller Sleezeburger with a three-inch bunny-tail off a concrete dock.
Fuller casts. Nothing. Casts again. Nothing. His last cast wakes a sunbather in the grass, 10 feet away. Nothing. “I wonder what happened to it?” Fuller says to himself.
Wike drops his bug into slow water at the edge of a bulkhead below the sunbather and gets ripped. A white belly flashes and the fish is gone. “That was him,” Fuller says, as the men glide upstream toward their date with MickDuffs. “Did you prick him?” Fuller asks. It won’t be long, just enough time for that beer and bisque, before Wike and Fuller are back at it and that bass has forgotten what bit him back.
he Columbia River wind tunnel offers monster smallmouth bass.
Vancouver, Washington—The Columbia River Gorge is a natural paradox, where the Pacific Northwest’s arterial waterway abruptly severs the Cascade Range, forming dramatic cliffs on both its Oregon and Washington shorelines. Like many anglers, I associated the Gorge’s turbid waters with storied fish such as migratory salmon and steelhead, as well as the leviathan white sturgeon that cruise the river bottom. Recently, however, I discovered that this is one of the most productive smallmouth bass fisheries in America.
But be warned: The Gorge is the perfect natural wind machine. Fronts push off the Pacific and are funneled between the cliffs, creating a jet-nozzle effect that buffets against the steady currents. Windsurfers flock to this locale for that very reason. For the angler, the wind makes casting with the long rod a challenge, even on the kindest days. Depending on the conditions, the Gorge can be a place to shoot Clouser Minnows toward craggy islands with the hope of hooking a five-pound smallie, or a place to launch yourself skyward over massive standing waves. The trick? Not doing both at the same time.
Fortunately, my introduction to bass fishing in the Gorge came under the watchful eye of G. Loomis executive and long-time Washington resident Bruce Holt. We fished last May, which Holt says is the most reliable month, in terms of weather and finding smallmouths staging to spawn.
Within minutes of launching his bass boat near Hood River, Oregon, Holt motored across the main current to a pea-gravel island and a series of rotting pilings near the Washington shore. He killed the engine, switched on a trolling motor, and began carving a delicate, deliberate path into the target zone.
“The smallmouth bass always relate to the shoreline,” he explained, as he hooked up on his second cast. “You want to key on protected coves and secondary points. And when the water warms and the fish get into spawning mode, shallow areas with stumps and pea gravel are best.”
Truth is, along the Columbia’s flood-prone shores, the bass don’t have all that many options—the wind and resulting wave action scours a spawning bed clean in most places. In other words, when you find a spot that looks promising, with gravel, structure and a bottom anywhere from two to six feet deep, you’ll find smallmouth bass, especially in spring and early summer.
During fall, which can be very productive on the Columbia, the game changes. Then, fat and healthy smallmouth hang around steep ledges and drop-offs, looking for forage. On the diverse Columbia, that forage could be crayfish, or American shad, salmon smolts, dace and other small fish. Anglers try to figure out what the fish are keying on, but sometimes that’s impossible and you just have to make them mad.
“If they’ll eat a tube jig, they’ll eat a Clouser or a Woolly Bugger or a crawdad fly,” Holt promised.
They’ll also eat a Geezus Lizard, as I learned. To fish that pattern, make a cast, let the fly sink, then start a slow, erratic retrieve by twitching and stripping your line and fly in.
In the Gorge, on good days, it’s easy to find bunches of cookie-cutter two-pound smallmouth, but if you spend enough time here you will bump into fish that weigh more than five pounds. The fishery is that productive.
Is that enough to make me put the two-handed salmon and steelhead rods in storage? No, not really. But there’s something more than sporty about playing smallmouth—big ones at that—on a fly rod, and something especially thrilling about doing so in a place as naturally wild and stunning as the Columbia River Gorge.
Elko, Nevada—The Jagged Ruby Mountains offer northeast Nevada’s most diverse and beautiful fly-fishing. Nestled below 11,000-foot-high peaks along the range’s western front, South Fork Reservoir is one of the region’s best fisheries, partly because you never know what you might hook; the fertile lake is renowned for sizable largemouth and smallmouth bass, as well as “wipers,” a cross between white bass and striped bass. Hefty brown, rainbow and cuttbow-hybrid trout also beckon.
Smallmouth are the marquee bass attraction at South Fork, which measures 1,650 acres and surrendered a 6-pound, 4-ounce state record in 2002. Bronzebacks grow fat (they average two to four pounds), wolfing down crayfish, leaches, shiners, dace and chubs. Damselfly and dragonfly imitations are deadly for these fish, too, worked along the shoreline and stripped several times between pauses. Dahlberg Divers take fish on or under the surface, along with Clouser Minnows, crayfish imitations, Biggs Specials, Woolly Buggers and Double Bunnies, stripped, jigged, or darted along the bottom.
Smallmouth anglers often focus on the reservoir’s north end, especially around rocky points and dam rubble. Smallies also concentrate around subsurface shoals and other structure that isn’t readily apparent, so grabbing a guide, at least for a day, helps tremendously.
South Fork smallmouth spawn from mid-May into mid-June—and that is the best time for casting flies. Summer success slows as reservoir temperatures rise and fish go deep; action accelerates again with cooler fall temperatures. Anglers get hook-ups from shore, but a boat or float tube pays dividends. Largemouth bass are less numerous and lurk in the south end of the reservoir near the inlet, where the water is shallower and more marshy. Try a deerhair popper cast tight to the shoreline during mornings or evenings, with a slow retrieve. Poppers also take smallmouth during calm conditions.
Conveniently located on the reservoir, the South Fork State Recreation Area offers a boat ramp and campground, along with terrific views of the Rubies. The park makes an excellent base and is an easy 16-mile drive for anglers staying in nearby Elko.
South Fork is one of northeast Nevada’s brightest bass stars, but it’s not alone. On the Rubies’ east flank rests remote Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge, with spring-fed ponds holding corpulent bucketmouths and trout. And north of Elko, Wildhorse Reservoir in the Owyhee River drainage also supports an excellent bass/trout fishery that routinely produces trophies. Wilson Reservoir is remote, but well worth an effort during forgiving weather—hit Wilson at the right time and you’ll likely find great fishing for largemouth, with some big trout thrown in, too. So, no, Nevada isn’t just a place to throw down your cards, bet on the spread or capture some overlooked, and large, trout. Nevada is bass central, and South Fork Reservoir just might be its best offering.
Bass In the sand dunes and sagebrush, or even in the shadow of volcanoes.
To demonstrate how the angling culture may be changing in Oregon, take my experience on a 200-acre public reservoir outside Burns, in the eastern part of the state. I was in my float tube and saw a mouse swimming 10 feet off a rocky shoreline. In a few seconds it was attacked. The splash said “lunker bass” to me. I waited a few minutes and changed out my sinking line for a floater and 12-pound tippet. I tied on a Morrish Mouse, known as a great Alaska rainbow pattern, but also a slammer for bass, then cast to shore and twitched the rodent. Six feet off the rocks the mouse got nailed and a four-pound rainbow shot into the air. I was fooled again, but that is Oregon for you, full of variety and surprises.