I took my son on his first Rufus Woods trip today. He is freshly discharged from the Air Force after several trips to the Iraqi desert. We put in at the Corps boat launch at about 10:30 am and headed up river for a net pen tour. Water temps were consistently running at about 54 degrees. Not much in the way of current today with no wind and low overcast skies. We arrived at the upper pens at about noon and dropped anchor between the pens and the shore. After about 15 minutes of fishing I hooked into a nice 13” native Rainbow using red Power bait hung about 10’ below the surface in 35’ of water. That was the last fish of the day and won me our standard $3.00 bet and bragging rights for the day. We fished the area around the upper pens for about four hours without another bite. I wanted my son to see the other pens close up before dark so we headed downriver and trolled past the middle set of pens without catching anything. I figured that we could motor down to the lower set of pens and troll around for awhile but when we arrived at the pens we saw something that I hadn’t seen before. As we approached the lower pens we watched a guy catch a fish from inside one of the pens and run to his boat that was tied up to the pen structure and drop the fish in a bucket. There were also a couple of other folks fishing and catching fish from directly inside one of the net pens. I snapped a couple of photos as evidence and we headed for home. Other than watching a couple of yahoo’s blatantly break the law it was a great day and I'm very grateful to have my son home safe.

---