This report is for both Friday and Saturday:

Friday:
- Headed out with my buddy Jay; we launched my Tracker out of Ft. Spokane and headed up the Arm. We slowly worked our way up river hitting the islands, McCoy's, Blue Crick and Lapham's. We vertical jigged and cast jigs from 15-50 FOW looking for active fish. Most of the fish we caught were in the 35-45 FOW range. Some were caught shallower off of rock piles and flats adjacent to the main river channel. This time of year it is key to find current seams and back eddies whenever possible. With Roosevelt down 40 Ft. it is important to know where the channel is or it could get expensive in a hurry. The water gets a little dingier as you go up river with the visibility down to about 2 feet the higher you go. For the day we totaled 39 walleyes caught and kept 25 between 16 and 21 inches. The largest for the days was a female about 3-4 lbs. that we released. As I was filleting the fish, most had 3-4 inch bait fish in the stomachs and one had a 3-4 inch perch that must have just been eaten because you could clearly see its coloring. As you can imagine anything that has the coloring of a perch is going to work well. 4 inch worms in green pumpkin, pumpkin with a chartreuse tail were the best producers.

Saturday:
- Saturday was a repeat of Friday but the bite was a bit slower. I went with another buddy in his Lund and hit most of the same areas as Friday. The bite was a bit slower but we kept 26 walleyes between 15-20 inches. A silver blade bait produced fairly well so did jigs, especially when fluttered in the current over a flat adjacent to the river channel. I did manage to catch one very nice 30 inch, 10 lb. female that was released to hopefully spawn. My buddy did have a problem when his boat cranking battery died; his trolling motor batteries were too dead also to crank his big motor so we slowly started drifting/trolling down river. Luckily a couple of nice gentlemen came up river to where we were and they actually had a spare cranking battery in their boat, go figure, I guess we had the "Luck of the Irish" going for us. They let us use their battery and followed us all of the way back to Ft. Spokane where we returned their battery. We know how long of a trip it is from way up river because 12 years ago we were up at buoy 5 when the same situation happened; it took us 6 1/2 hours to troll and walk pulling the boat from shore to get back to the Porcupine launch; there were no Leprechauns on the river, or anyone else. that day. The fishing should only get better over the next few weeks.

MS

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