Oregons High Lakes/Opener

I know there was an opener this weekend, Has anyone heard whats going on at O'dell or Wickiup. There was and article in the Oregonian stating snow at the lakes stay home and fish this weekend, and Diamond has ice on it not fishable just curious

I was at Wickiup this last weekend and I can tell you for sure that things could have been better. I usually do pretty fair there but not a single fish in 1 1/2 days of fishing. Only two bites the whole time. I tried to take advantage of the two rod rule we now have and kept one rod trolling while chasing them down with a jig on the other rod. The only strikes I got were from jigging. My father caught 4 while jigging, one while casting and horizontal jigging and the other three were from vertical jigging on the bottom. A good friend of mine who is quite good managed about 6 or 8 during a 3 or 4 hour stretch and then it just shut down for him. And he did better than anyone else I saw out there, although I did see a few others caught. But I never saw anyone doing even close to what I would call good.

As to Odell, I would say the water is still too cold. And that may well have been the problem at Wickiup. My friend who lives over there took a cruise across the lake last week for his employer and he took temp readings that seemed at least 3 or 4 degrees below the minimum acceptable. I'm waiting for a Friday evening report to determine if I'm going back to throw more money at them this weekend.

What a great day on the water. I had the pleasure of fishing with a couple of guys from Bend. It was a bit frosty this morning requiring ice to be scraped off the boat’s windshield. Once the sun peaked over the horizon the temperature climbed above freezing. It was a rare spring day on Wickiup where the wind never really blew all day. The water temp was 39F first thing in the morning and rose to 45 F by the time we left at 3:30.

It was not the best day of catching and the bites seemed to come in spurts. Also did not mark the numbers of fish I have seen in past years early in the season. We wasted 30 minutes jigging first thing. The reason it was a waste is we did not get one bump. And when were finally started to troll, we landed three fish in 15 minutes on pink hoochies before it slowed. And slow it did. I think we only had 5 fish by noon. We tried lots of different combinations to no avail. We even fished with a side planer so we could keep 6 rods in the water. I resorted to using in line flashers on one rod but that only caught one fish.

About 12 there was a small bite and we picked up a few more fish. At one point I had 4 strikes in row that were all LDRs. The crew was threatening to ban me from touching a rod after that.

It got quiet again until we nearly landed a triple. The wind decided to rear its head and started to blow a little so we decided it was time to head to the barn. It was a fun day on the water with a good crew.

The small fish were 11.5” and the biggest one was just shy of 16”. Surprisingly, it looked like the fish were already feeding on some daphnia.

well lets hope things get better thanks for the info mike/yes wickiup's a beautiful place and excellent camping