Decided to fish Lake Whatcom one more time before it closes for no reason on October 31st...Launched at around 9am, headed south to Strawberry Point as the wind was blowing about 10mph out of the south. With water temps in the low 60's still I started looking for a shallow bite throwing spinnerbaits and lipless crankbaits above and through the grass from 2-12 feet around docks, this produced two cuttthroat trout. Motored across the lake to the east side to let the wind push me back north, I alternated between grubs, crankbaits, lipless crankbaits and jigs on a ledge that breaks from about 4-5' out to 20-25', this produced several short strikes on the perch colored crankbait, and another trout on the lipless. Motored all the way back north to fish the shoreline the wind was blowing on to...not so much as a bite fishing depths to 25'. Thought about packing it in, but wanted to try some grubs and drop-shotting around the deeper pilings just off the east shore, so I headed south into the wind one more time and stopped by the large spawning flat with the two huge boulders where the pilings start. Made my way out to some pilings in about 20' of water and dropped the grub down, up and down and all around, no bites. Dropped the drop-shot down with a 1/2oz weight and a green Robo-Worm on about a 3' leader, a couple wiggles on that and smack! First smallie hookup of the day! Just shy of 2lbs, but it was a start...

I continued the process of letting the wind blow me just past the pilings, then I would hit the trolling motor on high and pin the nose of the boat right against the pilings, drop the worm down and shake it on both sides of the pilings, if this didn't produce a strike I would let off the trolling motor and drop the worm right down on the slack side of the piling and drag it backwards with the wind, sometimes that did it, but most the time the fish were on on the first drop!

I repeated this all over the place, caught fish from 15'-30', lost one about 3lbs five feet from the boat on a Panic Minnow, but he would have been the biggest, the photo's represent the average size. Caught 8-10 of those and turned the day around which was nice.

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