Sorry about the delay in getting this posted, I had 400 plus work related e-mails to wade through when we got back from our trip Tuesday afternoon.

We camped at Mossyrock Park on Riffe Lake and I plan to do a Blog post about the trip so I won’t get into the camping and exploring in my fishing report. That said we had a blast and TPW does an excellent job managing their parks. We fished Riffe Lake a number of times and after exploring the canyons fished Mayfield Lake for a few hours Sunday afternoon.

Sunday afternoon we explored the Cowlitz River (Dunn Canyon) and Tilton River canyons. They were absolutely beautiful. Fern covered shear rock walls dropping straight into turquoise water. After we got back to camp we got to talking about the adventure and decided that if TPW had increased the flows while we were back in the Cowlitz canyon we would have been in deep doo doo. The canyon is very deep (up to 80’ just a few feet from shore), narrow with strong shifting currents. If the flows had increased there would have been no room for error as we ran downstream back towards Mayfield Lake. We had lunch and swam at “Party Grove” at the upstream end of the Tilton canyon. The grove is a major party place, kind of like “Sand Bar” at Havasu, lots of floating money and bikinis. Lunch was fun but it was time to fish.

Returning to the main body of Mayfield Lake we fished tiger musky on the flats in front of the Tilton River for a few minutes. Throwing big swim baits we had a couple hits but never saw the fish. The wind was a struggle so we made a move down towards the Highway 12 bridge and got serious about throwing the swim baits at the various structure or cover features. We had a number of followers and two solid hits. Some of the followers must have been 40-50”. We had one fish create a wake as it charged the swim bait but he wouldn’t eat the bait. All in all the whole experience was pretty exciting and we are looking forward to learning more about the tiger musky fishery.

---