Decided to take advantage of a few days off during spring break and took my two sons fishing at Lenore for the weekend. My older son is in college and the younger one is 11. Both have done some fly fishing and while not experts they can cast a decent line and understand what they are doing.
We arrived just before dark on March 30th. I dropped both of them off at the north end lake and headed to check into a cabin at Sun Lakes Resort. I got back with about 30 minutes of daylight left and found them still experimenting with casting nymphs to sporadic rising fish, with no luck yet. Looked like the fish were taking tiny midges, so instead of trying to match it I tied a black #8 sparkle leach to a sink tip line and stripped it slowly. After a couple of strikes, the boys matched my rig and we picked up a couple of fish. One hook-jawed male about 16 inches and a bright female that probably went nearly 20. The fish quit hitting once the light was gone.
The next morning we got to the lake about 9 am. No fish were rising, so we tried leaches again with no luck. Another fisherman was working the rocks to our right, and was fishing a #14 chironomid under a strike indicator. As the morning wore on, he starting picking up fish at a constant rate, and we started seeing a few fish rising.
The water clarity was pretty poor, and the breeze started to kick up. Not enough to affect our casting, but enough it seems to start pushing a lot of surface junk (weeds, algae, etc...) to our end of the lake. The longer we fished, the worse the algae got. We tried every black chironomid I had in my box without so much as a strike. Feeling sorry for us, the gentleman even gave us a copy of the fly he was using and invited my sons to fish off the rocks next to him. Incredibly (and I know we have all had this happen at some point), we came to the point where my boys were fishing on either side of him, with the same flies he was using, and he was picking up fish at a rate of about one every 20 minutes and were weren't even getting a strike. the best fish we saw him land was a husky 23 inch male. We thanked him for his help and decided to take a lunch break and hike up to the Lenore Caves to sooth our frustrations.
We returned about 2 hours before dark to find the gentleman in the parking lot packing his truck. He said that the fishing "shut off" about the time we left and he had only picked up another fish or two that afternoon. Despite this report, we noticed quite a bit of activity on the surface, so we rigged up quickly and hoofed it down to the water. As with the previous night, it appears the fish were taking tiny midges. We rigged up leaches on sink tip lines and started dredging again. We immediately started picking up strikes, landing several good fish before dark. The main frustration that night was all the debris in the water, but there was decent action again until dark, when we packed up and headed home.
All in all, it is good to see the fishery in this lake seems to have recovered from the poaching fiasco a few years ago. Don't know how long it will last this year before the lake turns over and the weeds completely choke out the fishing. But the fish were strong, healthy, plentiful and feeding. Definitely worth the trip. This was my 11 year old's first trip to Lenore. He was astounded to be fishing a lake where a hook-up automatically means a 15"plus inch fish.

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