Just wanted to send in a quick report from this past weekend’s trip to Central Oregon.  Took the day off work on Friday and headed up with my neighbor and friend, Shaun Wilhelm.  This was Shaun’s first ever TTH experience and I warned him it might be a tough one since we were so late in the Fall.  I personally have little to no experience in the Fall fishing for browns, since most of the time I am hunting for deer.  This year, however, I drew an Eastern Oregon mule deer tag and scored on the second day of the hunt.  With no more hunting until elk around Thanksgiving, I planned a trip with fellow TTH buddies to fish at Paulina Lake in late October.

We arrived around noon to find Jimmy Lewis, Mike Scott, and Brian Wildish having lunch at the Paulina Campground.  We quickly setup camp and headed out for some fishing.  Fishing was slow for the most part except for one hour of pretty hot action.  Even though we only caught one fish on Friday, we had a lot of action casting lures and had a number of followers in the 3 to 4lb range.  I had one fish on for a few seconds before it came unbuttoned.  Gold seemed to be a good color stickbait for me.

Saturday morning came early after a fun night around the campfire.  We once again tried casting lures to our quarry in the shallows with very minimal success.  Two little dink browns and 6 hours later, we were feeling the lull of the fall day.  Shaun was being a real trooper working hard and not complaining once.  I was feeling bad for him, as he still hadn’t caught his first ever brown trout yet.  As some of my TTH buddies talked of checking out other lakes, I couldn’t resist the urge to move down to Wickiup for the rest of Saturday evening and Sunday morning to see if we could get Shaun into a descent brown.  I hated to leave, as this had been our plan to work Paulina for several months now.  However, I just didn’t have the confidence in it and felt my BEST chance to put Shaun onto his first brown was at the reservoir I cut my brown trout teeth on.  We pulled up camp and headed for the Deschutes Arm.  Lucky for us, this would prove to be the right move.

We got skunked Saturday night, but with success from Dan’s boat, I felt encouraged that we could get a good brown in the morning.  The good Lord shined down on us around 7 am with Shaun getting a nice SLAM of the rod while trolling in 20 feet of water.  He was flat lining a bomber lure and a beautiful 4 pound hen brown liked the offering.  After a few quick bursts and headshakes, she swam to the boat fairly easy.  With one scoop of the net, she was Shaun’s first ever brown and a nice one at that!  Just a little over 21 inches long.  Shaun was excited, to say the least, and it rejuvenated our fishing souls to push on for the next 4 hours.  Unfortunately, that would be our only fish, but I had to thank the man upstairs for this one.  It had been a pretty tough trip up to that point, and I was just thankful that Shaun was able to come away with a quality brown on his first ever TTH excursion.  His excitement also helped me to keep things in perspective and not take things for granted.  It wasn’t that long ago I was in his shoes hoping someday I could catch a brown over the 20 inch mark.  It’s times like these when I feel honored to put the new guy onto their first big brown versus catching one myself.  Good times and good memories for sure and seeing the adrenaline pumping in Shaun after landing his first trophy was worth all the slow times throughout this trip.   

Until next time, tight lines everyone!

R.D.

“Browns – Coyotes of the Fishing World!”