For me rating a trip can be challenging; do I base the rating on the number of fish brought home for the fry pan or smoker? The number of fish that came out to play or the use of my skills to encourage our aquatic opponent to engage me? Or maybe the overall experience, some combination of the number of fish caught, the technical difficulty, the scenery and zen factor? In considering all the above I think that our short trip to Lone Lake should be rated a 5. Served up with a double helping of “Zen”, it was one of our best trips all year!

We had talked about doing this trip for some time, but the drift boat had been buried at the back of the driveway. Last week I did the driveway two-step and shuffled trailers so I could get the drift boat out of the driveway. After a long day Saturday, we were on late night grand-kid duty. When Sunday morning rolled around, we had no hard departure time. As usual I was up before the chickens and got everything ready to go.

After a short stop at Holiday for hot beverages and the best deal on breakfast burritos in the Skagit Valley we settled into the 1 ½ hour drive down Whidbey Island. We arrived at Lone Lake around 9:30, and after an hour of yapping it up with the locals we were making like a water skeeter as I rowed across the lake.

The locals back at the ramp pointed us in the right direction and gave us a couple of their favorite flies for fishing the lake. After we dropped the anchor, I started rigging the gear while I gave a brief Fly Fishing 101 refresher course for the wife (turns out that I didn’t pay attention…). I had brought my fly pack without checking its contents and it turned out that it had been stripped of most of its trout gear, but we would be in good shape if we were fishing for salmon… After hacking up a bunch of tapered leaders, many nail knots and improvised rigging we were ready to go.

The plan was to fish leach patterns with or without an indicator. Using short jerky strips and pauses to retrieve the fly the method worked quite well, and we were enjoying frequent take-downs. Using our leach patterns, the Lone Lake trout savagely inhale the fly and go airborne. One fish cleared the water by 3’, it was pretty exciting. Our next trip we will be better prepared but for a learning trip this trip was a solid 5. Although the limit is 1 fish over 18” we safely released our finned friends.

Overall our short trip to Lone lake was perfect. We even took a break from fishing and enjoyed a hot meal prepared in my drift boat pizza oven. Lessons learned; to eliminate the variable wind swing I will bring a bow anchor on the next trip, bring my reading/fly-tying glasses and double check the gear bag to be better prepared for the fishery. It is a very peaceful fishery for quality trout. As I have said before we are blessed in that we have so many quality fisheries in our backyard.

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