Sunday morning rolls around and no plans, fishing or otherwise. I had a plan but the wind and I can’t seem to synchronize out schedules. It blows… Anyway, Sunday morning I was working on chores when the wife said “Let’s go fishing.” That was all I needed to hear and had the drift boat and gear ready to hit the road in 20 minutes. No real plan in place we hit Holiday Coffee for some hot caffeine and breakfast goodies for the drive.

I decided that we would try something new, and we set a course for Martha Lake by Stanwood. Karen had never fished it and it had 35 or so years since I had. Some time ago, in an effort to develop a quality trout fishery the WDFW lowered the limit to 2 fish with a minimum size of 14”. The lake is under Selective Gear rules and gets a healthy plant of brown trout fingerlings each fall, very intreaguing.

WE arrived at the lake around 11:00 and to our surprise the access site was a long narrow gravel strip with a rough launch at one end and an ancient pit toilet at the other end. Driving in nose first, I was barely able to do a 3-point turn to get the trailer headed towards the water. I would not recommend a trailer launch unless your rig is 4-wheel drive. A short while after arriving we were floating and had the rig parked without incident.

In that I did not think through my gear preparations very well, we had 4 flyrods and a couple light spinning rods onboard. In hindsight we should have brought a couple lead line rigs also. It looked like we were going to be fly-fishing. When we arrived, the wind was blowing and the lake was pretty choppy, we couldn’t really read the surface to get an idea where to start. We decided to troll a wooly bugger and a streamer until we had a bite then work the area chironomids. The plan sounded great but after a full loop around the lake we had very little action.

It was time to make some changes; we changed out the streamer for a black leach pattern and also put out a smaller olive wooly bugger. That seemed to do the trick and it turned out that the black leach pattern was the hot ticket for the afternoon. The wind was still blowing so we were still having to troll our flies. Shortly after we switched flies the bugger rod goes bendo but we missed the fish. That’s when the fun started. Working the same general area of the lake the black leach rod gets hammered and the fish is 4’ out of the water before we can get to the rod. We ended up losing the fish before it was under control, but the first 30 seconds or so got the old adrenalin pumping. We guesstimate that the fish was in the 5-6 pound range.

For the next 30-40 minutes the black leach had a free meal sign hanging off the hook. It was on fire! We hooked and released, hooked and lost and had numerous drive buys. On a fly rod it was pretty exciting. Unfortunately, our fishing window was coming to a close and we had to leave biting fish. Will we fish Martha Lake again? Yes, we will gear up a little differently but we will definitely fish the lake again.

It was a fun few hours on Martha Lake. We know what to expect with the access and launch. I have also completed a bit of research and will probably approach the browns a little differently. Although we didn’t catch a lot of fish were learned a lot and look forward to further exploration of Martha Lake.

---