Last week I went fishing at Henry Hagg Lake. For most of the day the weather was good with light wind, sprinkles and only a few showers. The day started with a great trout right off the bat, it gave me hope. But lots of actions was not to be, we had a few bites but just couldn't seem to catch anything so because we couldn't feel our feet I decided to call it an early day and after travel time got back home before 3:00. After dinner I loaded the video into my laptop and another disappointment was to fallow. The water clarity was worse then my last trip and with the light conditions lower it was hard to see anything at normal trolling and when we went deep the video was just black. I deleted the video and moved on.
I really wanted to get out on Wednesday or Thursday and get some good video so Sunday I looked at the weather forecast and saw a bit of hope, Wednesday is was going to be overcast and dry. I was hoping to get down to some of the small coastal creeks but the forecast call for record rain Monday, and it didn't disappoint with over 3 inches. Every river, creek and mud puddle was totally blown out. Wednesday came and I thought that the Columbia was the only river that had a chance of being able to be fished. I went to my home launch and headed up river to the Sandy River area and it was a swirling mess of sticks and mud. Then I went up farther and checked out the holes one by one until I found one I liked. I started the day with a plan, I brought out for cameras, the Canon for shooting video in the boat, the Polaroid action cam for shooting poll action and 2 Okuma under water cameras. The plan was to fish a sturgeon pole while shooting a how to cut plug video. In the water went the sturgeon pole with squid and no problems. Then with no rain I set up the Canon and started shooting the cut plug video and it went great. When I put the cut plugs in the water I could not see then which was my biggest concern. I finished me video and started packing up. Pulling up the sturgeon pole I brought up a little guest, the biggest crawdad I have ever caught. Until a few weeks ago I didn't even know that the Columbia had a crawdad population but I guess all the times we thought we had scalpin it could have been crawdads. I packed up and shot a video of the ride home.After dinner I popped out the video and loaded it into the laptop, what a disappointment, all the underwater video was unusable. The sturgeon camera was just black with no light penetration to the bottom and the cut plug video was around 6 inches visibility. All the silt or mud in the water just made it impossible for light to pass through the water or the camera to shoot through it, more garbage video. On the plus side the surface video was great now only If I had underwater video to go with it.
At this point it looks as if I will just have to try again next week, there is no record rain in the forecast so I will just shoot for Wednesday because the clearing on Tuesday might clear up the big rivers.
