It’s 6:30 am as I’m hooking up the boat when I can hear the radio talk show host all the way down the street and the raddle tat of the old minivan van heading this direction. My fishing partner has arrived! We toss in those last few things and head for the place I’ve been dreaming of for the last couple years. Lake Omak and the giant Lahontan cutthroats. Five hours goes by pretty fast when you have so much in common, besides we’ve probably told each other the same stories many times over and can’t remember. That’s the benefit of being an ‘old fart’ fisherman. We decided to take a break about 4 hours into it and stop at Davis lake (Winthrop) where last trip I did pretty well. This time I was armed with Larry’s goto fly the hail bop. We killed it on that the last couple outings. Sure enough we had several 10-12 inch rainbows in the boat in a couple hours so decided to finish our trip onto Omak. We arrived at the Omak inn (cute little hotel) for one more night of dreaming about those giant Lahontan cutthroats before we got our chance. We met up with all the others for dinner at the local Indian casino. We all shared stories of the day's catches (lots of fish stories going around). After sharing secret intelligence reports and Googling the secret spots we were ready.
It was unseasonably warm that morning as Larry and I swallowed down a ½ pharmacy worth of morning pills, again that’s part of being the ‘old farts’ and off to the secret spot to hunt that record cutthroat. We launched and we both dropped in whatever we had on from the last trip as we prepared the next rod. It wasn’t but a few minutes I had the first one on using my goto black and blue leech, brown collar with the fluorescent orange body and head.
I never changed that fly all day! It sure did its job as we caught too many fish to count and our biggest were 20”. Well, I should say I caught too many to count, poor old Larry just couldn’t get a break.. We tried every fly we had that looked like mine and I was still catching 10 to 1.. at one poi
nt I was embarrassed so as I had the next fish on I handed the rod to Larry and said “let’s switch”! He pulled in that fish and I proceeded to catch three more on HIS FLY AND ROD! It was just one of those days. Mind you, Larry has been fishing for probably 50 years AND has out fished me on every trip! That night in the hotel we racked our brains over why.. why??? Then in a moment of genius I had it… Larry was tying his knots with 6 turns and I was using my normal 7 turns. Everyone knows that 7 is a Godly number and 6 is… well I’m not even going to say it.. So while everyone else was going to another lake that day we just had to go back and test our theory. Well day two we got out on the water and bam first fish-on in minutes. Again I can’t even count how many fish I caught, but for our theory, that wasn’t it, poor old Larry could only manage two for the day. We decided it must have just been my day! Larry would say it was a good day fishing for him and a good day catching for me.
