This past weekend I hiked up into Royal Basin for some quality camping time with my dad and cousin and hopefully a few fish. After what I would consider to be a fairly difficult hike (especially with 30lbs of gear) I arrived at the lake to be greeted by numerous rises. I spent a little time recouping and then got out to the lake in the early evening. I only fished the south shore the first night (Friday the 16th) and went through quite a number of small spinners in subdued color patterns before I finally figured I would try the classic 1/8oz gold and crimson Kastmaster. I didn't know how the alpine Brook Trout of a lake at 5100' would react to a fish imitating lure, but apparently it was the right choice because I got three hits on it in fairly quick order, with one of those hooking up and coming to shore. A silvery Brookie at about 8".

Friday night was quite stormy and we woke up on Saturday to see that most of the weather had passed, but the clouds were still rolling through and the rain was spitting occasionally. We decided to continue our stay through to Sunday though as it seemed like the weather was starting to weaken. Getting out to the lake on Saturday a bit before noon I was able to fish for about two hours and worked my way pretty much around the entire lake at all decent looking/accessible spots. I only used the same Kastmaster from the night before as it was clearly the favorite lure. Starting on the south shore again I fairly quickly hooked into another Brook. Moving around to the south east side of the lake I was able to find a spot that was holding quite a few Brookies and proceeded to catch four more on the Kastmaster, one at about 7", another at about 8" and then two more that were probably more like 10". I wasn't keeping anything, so I continued fishing. I was also happy to find that the lake didn't just have tiny fish in it, but respectable size specimens (10") for an alpine lake.

Continuing around to the steeper parts of the eastern shore I was able to bring in two more Brookies by casting close to shore. The lake in general isn't huge, and probably isn't more than maybe 20' deep at the deepest (guessing), but most of the eastern shore drops off fairly quickly and I found that I was getting no hits out deep. The only hits I got fishing the drop offs were by casting fairly close to shore and retrieving the lure through the more shallow areas. I'm not sure why the fish were so willing to follow the lure, but many of the hits I had came withing about 5' of my rod tip, which was quite entertaining. I then continued on to the north and west shores, but found that the access isn't as good and the got no hits there either.

Later that evening I went out again and got two more Brookies, both from the south east shore, using the same Kastmaster. One interesting thing I noted about my retrieves was that the fish didn't seem to be interested at all when I twitched the Kastmaster a bit during the retrieves. On some lakes it seems like the fish won't even look at the lure if you won't twitch it, but here it was completely opposite, I had to keep the action straight and uniform in order to get them to hit. I rated the trip a four due to the slow first night, but I think that was simply due to the fact that I was still sorting out the lake and had limited time. A total of 10 feisty alpine Brook Trout in about 4 hours total of fishing is pretty good in my book!

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