This was a preparatory trip to introduce my daughters' boyfriend, I'll call him Sport, to fishing. We are planning another trip to Westport in May to catch some Halibut and do a little jetty and surf fishing. Sport had only been fishing once before many years ago. We made a first stop at Scouteney Reservoir at the north end wasteway to see if the crappie might be in a biting mood, but they were not. I showed Sport how to tie a knot and being relatively intelligent for a teenager he did not need another lesson all day. This stop gave him plenty of opportunity to practice his casting. He did very well and only had a few problems because of the wind. The sun warmed us very nicely between the chilly wind coming off the Cascades. The cattails were explosive. One little touch and they would explode into puffs of seed. After a little lunch we moved on to Warden lake. I had not been fishing here before but we easily managed to find a place to park and followed the trail around the West side a short distance to a likely looking cove. I help Sport rig up a bobber with some weight, a marshmellow and a bit of worm. He had the cast down pretty good now after throwing out a smaller rig for the non-existent crappie. I tried a rooster tail spinner and a small planter managed to hook himself on the second cast. I therefore gave the spinner rig to Sport. He cast a half dozen times and hooked up with a little bigger rainbow. He was thrilled to land the second fish of his life. We continued on for another hour or so and brought in several more. Since neither of us are overjoyed with trout for dinner we let all of them go and only kept a few which were badly hooked through the gill or eye. As the sun was getting lower and other anglers were heading back to the ranch we moved around the corner to try some different terrain. This spot had a little steeper drop off and a few large rocks in the water. We tried some other spinners and found a shiny silver Mepps enticed several to hook themselves on the end of our lines. Since we had brought along a dozen pieces of meat and the flash seemed to attract the colored sides we put on a wedding ring rig with some meat attached. Sport caught one right away. I had a whole strip of worm hanging on the hook when the rod almost flew out of my hand. Something a bit more worthwhile? A bass? Walleye? It was a steelhead smolt twice the size of the rainbows and twice as fiesty. The sun was getting low and the air was getting nippy again so we headed back to the snacks and drinks. All in all we brought in a dozen denizens of the deep but only kept three as Sport's mom said she would eat fish if we caught them. A side trip to Moses Lake hooked us up with my wife and daughter, the love interest, who just happened to be at a volleyball tournement. They were not even put off by a couple of fishy stinky fellows. And we only found one tick.

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