Opening Day – April 26, 2008 Time 1:00pm – 6:00pm
Location: Lake Margaret, King County, WA

Money spent on flies: $37.84
Money spent on gas: $14.17
Money spent on food: $7.95
Money spent on drinks: $10.85

Grand Total: $70.81

Opening Day: simply… PRICELESS

Well it finally arrived – Opening Day 2008. I thought I’d hit up a lake pretty far away from my home that always has been good to me in the past. It was great again today. I abandoned the spoons, flatfish, and powerbait jars, left them all at home, and instead packed the fly rod and fly boxes. After a 45 minute drive I arrived at Lake Margaret. I managed to catch and release close to 30 stockers on two flies. I used floating fly line with a 5X leader. I tied on a prince nymph first (size 14), and then trailing that by 4 feet I tied on a black/green Wooley Bugger with the green head. That was the ticket along with the prince nymph. The Wooley Bugger was size 8. I trolled around the whole lake for about 5 hours with a fish on every 5-10 minutes or so it seemed. The fish were all 10-12 inches, but I managed to hook 3 cutthroats all around 14” and two rainbow holdovers that were close to 14.” My barbs were pinched so I lost a lot of fish boat side…that was alright though. I’m pretty sure most all of them survived another day for all you to catch! Overall, it was warm, too, air temp was 68F and water temp was 55F. There is something about this lake that is just amazing. I saw 3 bald eagles scooping fish up right and left and that went on all day long – fun to watch. There were about 15 boats on the lake at any given time and the parking lot was jammed full. Everyone seemed to be catching fish, but they were using too heavy of tackle…pop gear and worm, etc. To my surprise, no one was fly fishing, I was the only one. Towards the very end I switched over to a small, size 18, elk hair caddis and had 4 stockers take the dry…that was pretty sweet. Light wind out of NW at 7 with no measurable gusts. It was picture perfect. It was a safe and fun Opening Day! I hope you all enjoyed it as well!

KTK

(once the new version of the site is up and running (end of May I think) you should check out the hotspots section -- it will really help you out - great feature guys...)

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