Great Combo Trip on the Moke

I was fortunate today to get the oppotunity to fish the Mokelumne river one last time before it closes for the winter this Monday. My hope was to have a great day of floating and fishing for steelhead, or as I like to call them, O.Mykiss, since rainbow trout and steelhead are the same species and they can often be difficult to tell apart. But enough technicalities, on with the fishing!

I think maybe we overpacked. Note that our boats were heavy enough to flatten the tires.

 

I woke up this morning psyched about the trip. I got enven more excited when I looked out the window and then checked the weather: cool and overcast. Perfect for steelhead fishing. I then packed for the trip and as usual by the time I was done I had a rediculous amount of fishing gear in my Cuda.

The Cuda ready for action.

Nice Job Jason
 

I met up with Jason from the shop and we headed up to the day use area. We then realized that we only had one set of wheelies, so we decided to stack the boats so we could walk up a little higher than the last parking lot and fish that much more of the river.

Maybe holding the trout like a bass was a sign.
 

When we arrived at the river we were happy to see fish rising. Jason got a nightcrawler rigged and was into a fish immediately, while I rigged up some fly rods. Once I finished rigging, I headed down to the river with a nightcrawler and was also into a fish immediately. Neither of the fish were big, but we were off to a good start.

With such great success early on, we thought it could be a really great day of fishing. Unfortunately we didin't hook another trout until several hours later. We did however, discover that the Mokelumne can be a great place to catch bass in the fall. We stopped at a slow back water area and since the trout fishing was slow, decided to see if there were any bass. We were in luck. Not only was the area teaming with bass, but they were hitting the surface. I tied a popper onto my fly rod and ended up catching 5 small bass and a bluegill. Jason also managed to catch 5 or six small bass on a senko. At this point we abaondoned the trout and went into bass mode, searching for other back water ponds. We came to one other pond that had much larger bass in it. Jason was able to catch one bass and even landed a trout on a wacky rigged senko!

Surface action. Sweet!

All in all we had a wonderful day of fishing landing a total of 3 trout, 12 bass, and a bluegill. Not bad for a relaxing day of floating. A big thanks to Jason for shuttling and making today possible.