Columbia River 2 - Me ZERO...

I have been mentally healing and trying to figure out some 'cute' stuff to say about the Columbia River fishing trip that I was so bragging about last week. I thought I had it all down this time after being skunked on my first fishing trip up there earlier in the year. I was expecting to bring home lots of Sturgeon meat from medium sized fish you can keep up there and pics and stories of catching some really big ones. Well, that didn't happen at all. In fact, nobody was catching large fish except for this seal, but he was cheating...

This time we were fishing below the Bonneville Dam, about 50 miles from Portland, which was much prettier than the other place we fished up river - as you can see by the picture below...



If you look real hard, you can see a orange ball in the water by each of the boats in the picture. That is part of this special anchor system that must be used up there. It allows the boat to remove itself from the anchor, leaving it there and take off to get out of the way of these giant barges and ships that go up and down the river. Little boats fish all over the place and when one of these big ships/barges is coming though, it figures out its path and it is up the to the little boats to get out of the way or get ran over. When that happens, the little boats just release their connection to the anchor ball and get out of the way until the river is clear again and then they go back and reattach to their anchor line. Below is one of the barges that we had to move for...


The fishing really sucked - again. Our guide could not be held accountable for this mess though. Nobody was catching fish while we were there. The week before, everybody was catching fish and from what I hear they are all catching fish again now. I guess the fish were just taking a holiday from being caught for the time we were there - Grumble, Grumble. Here is a picture of Don with the largest fish caught on the trip. I caught 2 that were two feet or less, which were the smallest Sturgeon I have ever seen...



The boat was great as was the nice little town of Stevenson WA we stayed in. The only negative was the hotel which was run by a 'foreign' family and not maintained well at all. That and my room neighbors were full vans of young male 'foreign' workers that partied all night.

I don't think I have been more bummed about a trip result ever in my life. Its a big commitment in time and effort to do a trip like that and to get skunked again was painful, to say the least.

It was very nice to get home to Pam and the cats, who missed me and helped to lick my wounds. Life is good here in DaHo...