Show: The Fishing Show Station: KNCO File: 9:19.mp3 Air date: 2026-09-19 Source: OpenAI whisper-1 · shrunk from 98.9 MB to 12.4 MB --- transcript --- News Talk 830. The views and opinions of Denis Peirce do not represent those of ownership, management, and staff of Nevada County Broadcasting and KNCO. The KNCO Fishing and Outdoor Report with Denis Peirce is a service of Craig Johnson Plumbing. Honest, reliable, and fair. Find them online at craigjohnsonplumbing.com. Betcha goin' fishin' all of the time, baby goin' fishin' too. Bet your life, your sweet wife, will catch more fish than you. Many fish bites if you got good bait. Here's a little tip that I would like to relate. Many fish bites if you got good bait. I'm a-goin' fishin', yes, a-goin' fishin', and my baby goin' fishin' too. I went on down to my favorite fishin' hole, baby grabbed me a pole and line. Threw my pole on and caught a nine-pound catfish. Now you know I brought him home for supper. Time-proven. Many fish bites if you got good bait. Here's a little tip that I would like to relate. Many fish bites if you got good bait. I'm a-goin' fishin', yes, a-goin' fishin', and my baby goin' fishin' too. My baby brother about to run me out of my mind. Say, can I go fishin' with you? I took him on down to the fishin' hole. Now, what do you think that he did do? Pulled a great big fish out the bottom of the pond. Now he laughed and jumped, because he was real gone. Many fish bites if you got good bait. I'm a-goin' fishin', yes, a-goin' fishin', and my baby goin' fishin' too. Put him in the pot, baby, put him in the pan. Live here on Friday evenings with the KNCO Fishing and Outdoor Report, and we start off the show each week with Taj Mahal and the Fishin' Blues, and we usually have a sing-along here in the studio, and I wanted to compliment Mr. John August on his voice. One of these weeks, we're going to have him sing the song a cappella, and that will be a real treat for you. But before we get too far into tonight's program, I want to thank our sponsors, Drs. Jerry Chan and his daughter, Dr. Tiffany Chan. The Chan Family Optometry Practice is located at 360 Sierra College Drive. In fact, I saw Jerry just last night. There was a history program at the Sierra Presbyterian Church, and Dr. Jerry Chan was in there taking in the, you know, there was a real nice lecture. Anyways, there was a whole other story there. But if you're looking for quality family eye care by a group of people in that office that are strong supporters of the community in many, many different ways, and since it is NU football season, Jerry Chan played for the NU football team, but no time in the recent past, I think it was back in the 1960s, something like that. But great people, great members of the community, born and raised here, and I don't know, I always have, I have nice things to say about them because they are nice people, and they are very competent at the work that they do. Our second sponsor is TrollingFlies.com, the home of Arctic Fox Trolling Flies, Jay Fair Trolling Flies. This is the season. Much of the sales right now are all focused on Eagle Lake and Jay Fair Trolling Flies, although they work a lot of other places too. But anyways, this evening's program, our guest is going to be Val Aubrey, and we're going to be talking about fish in Eagle Lake, what things are looking like today. She was on the water today, what to expect into the near future, and hopefully help you pick out some dates that you might want to get up there and enjoy that fishery in modest temperatures. December, January, the temperatures are not modest, but October can really be pretty good. All right, what we've got going on in the program this evening, in addition to Val Aubrey being on, we're going to talk a little bit about salmon fishing. Checked in with Dustin Lunder today. He spent the week down there on the Feather River. He is fishing. He's launching at Gridley and heading upstream. He does not go all the way to the afterbay hole, and I stumbled across a drone video of the afterbay hole today. It was on Facebook. I'm not sure how to help you find it, but it was a real interesting look because I have not driven down there. You can see that they're building a new boat launch ramp upstream of the afterbay hole. You can see how much water is coming through, and there are a ton of anglers around the edge of that thing, and the water is high. It is up into the brush on the sides of the river, and I'm guessing probably the only consistent spot to be able to fish from shore is the afterbay hole. You might be a spot for one angler here or there going downstream through the high flow area down there, but there's a lot of water coming down the Feather River. I was talking to Justin, and he was saying that they had been slowly dropping the river. I mean, on my notes here, I think it was back at the 1st of September. It was 7,800 cubic feet per second, and they've been slowly dipping it down to Monday of this week. It got to 6,300, and something has changed with the water thing, and they are ramping it back up, and the word is potentially it could be back up to 8,000 tomorrow. Point being, high water on the Feather River, high water is good for bringing more fish up. Water temperatures throughout the day today over there, it ran between 56 degrees first thing in the morning and 59, maybe 60 degrees once they got into the afternoon, but those are excellent temperatures for the salmon to bring the salmon up into that part of the river. Justin was saying, it was a couple weeks ago, I guess, that he was running plugs and trolling in the mornings up there, and then late morning, he was switching to dragging eggs. He said he's stopped that regime. He's doing the entire day running upstream, drifting down with the current, and dragging eggs, pulling them behind the boat, using a weighted system of one sort or another to get the eggs to be bouncing along the bottom anywhere from a foot to six inches off the bottom, and that's how he's been getting his fish. What I was hoping to hear was that there was just an incredible bigger slug of fish come up, and he said he hasn't seen that all year. He said there's a constant addition of new fish coming through, but no big wave that this high water might have brought up if those fish were going to be coming into the system. Anyways, he said there's a decent amount of fish. Three days ago, he had one fish per man on either three or four anglers in the boat. Then yesterday, he had three limits, three guys, two per guy. Today, he had four anglers and four limits, so it can bounce between a fish per rod and two fish limits, but a lot of it has to do with how well you know the river and how well you know how to fish for salmon. If you just go down there on a casual basis, getting those kind of results aren't guaranteed by any means whatsoever. At 6,000 to 8,000 cubic feet per second on the feather, you've got to have somebody in control of that boat the entire time. If you're not anchored up, you need somebody in control of that boat the entire time. If you get down further on towards Verona, where the Feather and the Sacramento come together, and if you get down below there, I was looking at some of the social media posts that Sean Rainsberger had this week, and it looked like he was fishing down there. It might have been as high up as Knight's Landing, but I think it was below Verona down through there. He showed some photos of some nice fish that they landed this week. So, you can get down there. I think it's a little easier to navigate down there. There's more flow, for sure, with the combined sack and the feather, but it's a slower velocity, deeper water, that sort of a thing, and you can troll down there or you can anchor up, but there are a number of guys down there fishing. The observation that Justin Leonard had about the number of salmon running up the Sacramento River, his anecdotal evidence to that is that the Sacramento River guides who live up in the Redding area and want to fish in their backyard, they're down on the Feather River fishing right now, and he said that just speaks volumes about what's not happening on the Sacramento River yet. General rule of thumb, the Feather comes on earliest, the Sacramento is a bit behind the Feather, then comes the American, then comes the McCallamy. So, I haven't given up hope on the Sacramento yet, but in my conversations with Jeff Goodwin, who lives up by Redding or north of Redding, I think, anyways, he lives in the general Redding area up there. He does not want to drive all the way to the Feather River, but he said the fishing had been tough up there on the sack, you know, Red Bluff and those areas up through there, Corning, you know, Woodson Bridge, that kind of stuff. He said it's pretty tough. We're up against our first commercial break. Toward the end of the program, I'm going to talk about the Trinity River. Good reports from there on salmon fishing, but we're going to have our guest Val Aubrey come on after a word from our sponsors. Get your ducks in a row because one little duck could win you five thousand dollars. It's the 49er Rotary Gold Country Duck Race, Sunday, September 20th at 1 30, part of Nevada City's Constitution Day festivities. 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I'm not saying they're a bad person, it's not their fault. I mean it's their parents' fault for being cousins or something, but it's not their fault. Nikki Glaser, Friday, September 25th. The venue at Thunder Valley. Tickets on sale now at ThunderValleyResort.com. Don't miss Nikki Glaser, The Stunning Tour. Hungry? Skip the packaged stuff and mystery meals. At Robinson's Gas Station on Bennett in Maine in Grass Valley, we're serving up fresh, homemade, locally crafted food. A full burrito and taco bar, and traditional pasties, all made fresh daily. Need something for later? Grab a take and bake pasty. This isn't your average pit stop. It's local, fresh, and worth the stop. Robinson's Gas Station on Bennett, Maine, where local eats meet the road. This is Dennis Pearce. We're back with the KNCO Fishing and Outdoor Report, and our guest this evening is back again, Val Aubrey. Val lives up on the shores of Eagle Lake outside of Susanville, California. Val, welcome back to the program. Well, thank you very much, Dennis. So how did you spend your day today? Fishing. Fishing. You know, Val, you have your priorities right. That's all I can say. So what time did you get on the water today? Well, you know, we got down there about 6.15, launched, trolled right out of the gate, had four beautiful fish by nine o'clock, and, you know, the smallest was 19 inches and shy of three pounds by an ounce, and the biggest was three and a half. We're not complaining. So did you just stay right there in front of the boat launch ramp, or did you cruise around a bit? You know, we've been kind of all over the lake the last couple times we've been out, and just checking things out. You know, we had that little lull, you know, when we had the big wind and kind of a little bit, you know, just blustery conditions, but we found fish in the slack water before the wind hit the lake, and so we ended up doing really well. We had one tough day, and from that point on, we've been doing really well. It's been a phenomenal week, to be honest with you. Now, where are we at water temperature? That's sort of my thing. When I spoke to you last week or the week before, the top layer was cooler than the bulk of the lake below it. Is that same profile going on? Yes, it is, and I've done two drops this week just to see what, you know, how the lake is responding to the cooler temperatures. We're still looking at that surface starting out 60, 61. By three feet, it's starting to increase in temp, and from five feet to get this, 83 feet, it's 63 degrees, 0.1 to 0.3. So, it's dropped almost a half a degree since Monday in the entire water column. So, the big bulk down below has dropped a degrees this week? Yeah, like 0.5 to 0.6 degrees the entire water column, and that seems to be pretty quick, you know, since I've been checking it, you know. What are your overnight lows like? You know, anywhere from 28 to 32, 33. It's a bit nippy, you know, in the morning. It's been a little humid. We got steam rising off the lake off Eagle and Merrill campgrounds in the morning, and it's really a pretty awesome sight to see the steam rising off the lake and swirls, and, you know, we get underneath it, and you can still see, you know, a couple hundred feet, so you can pretty much fish with other boats. The lake is not crowded, you know. We've, you know, I mean, it's almost nice to see another boat to have them move those top water fish over to you, you know. Is it unusual for the lake to cool off in a mass like that, where you have, you know, from five feet to 80 feet, virtually the same temperature, but dropped? Because it was what? It was in the high 60s, or was it 70? Yeah, it was 72, 73, all the way down to like 45 feet, so now, you know, we're 10 degrees cooler in the whole water column. Now, is there wind that's mixing that? We had the big winds. We've had some pretty fair, normal, Eagle Lake winds in the afternoon. The mornings have been beautiful, you know, but yeah, when the wind blows on this lake, basically the entire column of water is rolling, you know, because it's not that really that deep of a lake, so when that whole water column gets rolling, yes, definitely it's mixing, and that's been pretty much the norm since the drought and the lower water levels. With the higher water levels of the past, the thermal climbs, you could actually see, I mean, they were four to six degrees, they would come up, they would go down, you know, with the seasons, and then, you know, once the water temperature's in the low 50s, high 40s, it's all the same, you know, so, but it's, since the drought, it's been normal to see the entire water column change at the same time, just it all drops at the same time and varies very little. Well, because I, that doesn't seem, I would not have guessed that that was the case, that it would do that. I always thought that there would be temperature variation according to depth of one sort or another. Well, as it, as it, as it heats up in the summertime, we get that, and then as it cools down, it seems, you know, for fall, it seems like it's very, very slow to cool down, but that it all cools down pretty much at the same rate. Okay, we're, are you seeing any fish at depth or are all the fish up high in that top layer? You know, we're seeing fish at, you know, you know, quite a few at, you know, 15 to 23 feet, but we're not catching them there. I'm, I'm, I got one on my top line on an orange fly this morning and I'm, I'm no deeper than one and three quarter colors of leadcore off of my, my leadcore, and I'm running like 35 feet a liter, and, you know, that, that one has been really, the short line has really been doing a lot of good this week. Okay, and the, were you fishing by yourself or were there other people on your boat? No, I've been fishing with my buddy Roy Nash and we just like to go out there and, and change up lures and, and flies and see what happens and, you know, we always end up going back to what's been catching, you know, for the last month and a half, and that's what we end up getting them on. Are you seeing many tewee chub minnows? You know, we're seeing a few. They go in and out from the shoreline due to the water temperatures, so there is a tendency once it warms up a little bit that they'll, they'll be in closer to shore a little bit later in the afternoon, but sometimes in the morning you won't see them. They'll be out in, in, you know, seven, eight feet of water. They're not far from shore, but the guide is your birds, is your grebes, you know, for where the minnows are or where there is feed, you know. Are they typically a schooling fish or are, is it common to find just individuals of the minnows out there? They, no, they're in schools. They're in, they're in big, big schools. Okay, but is that the key then to getting fish in this season right now is finding the bait fish? Not exactly because we've had that Daphnia spawn and it's just thick. Every fish that I've caught along Pikes Point, Merrill Campground, I've got minnows, minnows and fish over off Christian Wildcat, but not so much at, you know, Pikes, Merrill, even up to Eagle's Nest, even up to Shrimp Island, it's all been Daphnia. Okay, and when there's a lot of Daphnia out there and the fish are on them, what's your first choice lure when they're in those conditions? Well, you know, it kind of changes, you know, from being the dark of the morning to having the sun come up on the water. The flies have been doing really well for me in the early morning before the sun comes up and hits the water and then the copper lure at running it like six, seven, eight feet and it's been the winner. Now, what kind of speeds, are you running a continuous speed or are you changing speeds a lot? We change speeds all the time. We are never really ever going in a straight line, so our lines are always on a turn or a bend or, you know, so our lines are basically working a column of water, you know. I mean, we can work, you know, five, six, seven, eight feet of depth with our lures, but we've been trying to maintain, you know, 1.9 to 2.3 miles an hour trolling. That's pretty quick, actually. It is pretty quick. You know, we're looking at, you know, the top water where we're catching them at 61 degrees in the early morning and the fish are there. They're feisty. They're fighting really hard. They've all resisted arrest since we dropped to 60 feet, you know, and they've been a lot of fun and they've been nice, solid fish. I haven't got one under 19 inches and I haven't gotten one over 21 and a half, but you know what? They've been nice, solid fish, nice heavy fillets and beautiful meat. That is a nice trout almost anywhere that you would go, yeah, and to have so many of them there at Eagle. You've not mentioned at all small fish. What size are they planting at the lake? Well, when they have been planting, they've been planting the collection throughout the spawn. You know, back decades ago, they just collected them over a week's period at Pine Creek and then that was it. We're gone. We're out of here and the fish were all pretty much the same size, so now they're collecting over a matter of weeks and so we will get, you know, smaller fish, some maybe three or four inches long, some, you know, 10-11 inches long depending on the hatchery and when they were fertilized and hatched, which actually represents more of a native spawn for a hatchery produced fish. Okay, that's a good goal. We are up against our second commercial break of the evening. Our guest this evening, Val Aubrey. The topic with Val as always or normally is Eagle Lake. 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Is there any advantage of going up there and getting frosted on? Well, I'll tell you what, by November, launching might get skinny for larger boats and we all want to be comfortable. And right now, we can get in the water pretty safely and get it done and get your meat and go home for breakfast. Okay. Do you have any idea on where we're at lake level-wise here in the second half of September of 26 versus last year or the year before? I believe, you know, I got that a couple of weeks ago. I believe we are about seven, eight inches lower. I'd have to double check on that. But we're on the negative side. Yes. Okay. You've lived in Eagle Lake for quite a few years. Does a strong El Nino put a lot of weather where you guys are in the rain shadow of the mountains over there. Does a strong El Nino, is there a hope for it to put a lot of water into the lake this year? Well, when we had a wet El Nino in 2005, 2006, where our temperatures were warmer, the snow fell two or three inches and then melted. Creeks were all flowing in the middle of December. We ended up coming up five feet just from basically that. Most of it local because a lot of our tributaries only start and end here, you know? Right. But Pine Creek is the only one that actually goes up, you know, 40 miles. But, you know, five feet of water would be ideal. In 92-93 winter, we had over 22 feet of snow in Spalding, at the lake, on the lake, and by spring, the lake could actually come up over 10 feet, just over 10 feet. Wow. So, on that note, either way, if it's a wet one or a blustery, cold, snowy one, we're hoping to get something in the lake. Yes, because when you got that phenomenal snow winter, did your storms ever come from the east to the west rather than from the west to the east? Yes. Yes. The east actually provides us a heavier snowfall because we're not in that shadow coming from the west where things rain out, snow out before it gets here, and then we get a little sprinkle or, you know, a couple of flakes that fall and it moves on. Okay. Based on your years and years up there on the lake, we're roughly at the lowest of the 60s right now water temperature. What is prime water temperature, in your opinion, for the surface at Eagle Lake? 58. Okay, you're not far off it then. No, we're not far off of that, but that's when they start really fighting. Right now, they're already getting airborne. You got to keep the pelicans at bay when they're flying up. Pelicans know what you got. One of my tricks to keep the fish from flying out of the water repetitively is to get my rod tip in that water and sink it just as far as it'll go, and that keeps the fish down in the water for me and it keeps them from flying up and being an acrobat because these fish, you know, when they get going and they're really fat and feisty, six feet is not a problem for them to fly out of the air. Will a pelican or a grebe or something catch the fish on the fly, out of the air? Pelicans, yes, and all I can say is you got 22 pounds of bird flying with your line, just get out the scissors. Okay, word to the wise. Other times in our conversations, you've talked about fishing around the rock piles out there in the water. Were you doing any rock pile fishing today or were you just top lining at a random pattern? We were working underwater structure, definitely anywhere from 6 to 25 feet. Okay, but structure fishing is standard procedure for you there at Eagle Lake? You know, I love working the structure, but we've had them all week off of basically just the south shore from the marina all the way to Christie. And we have them on the scope out in deeper water, you know, 30 to 40 feet, but we can't make them bite out there. So we moved in to like basically 8 to 15, 20 feet and making our turns and we've got a beautiful mass of fish all the way along that shoreline, all the way to Christie and then around the corner and up to Wildcat. So they have moved into shallower water for us for big numbers, you know, numbers of fish and catching your limits. And, you know, they've been nothing under 19 inches in that whole area for us. So we're not unhappy with that. Okay, for people that don't know the landmarks well at Eagle Lake, if the boat launch ramp at the south end, if the lake were o'clock with the boat launch ramp at six o'clock at the south end of the lake, you were talking about fishing six, seven, eight, nine, ten o'clock around that edge? Yes. Okay. Yeah, because a lot of people don't know Christie and Maryland and a number of the different landmarks that are out there. Right. And if you go to the right out of the ramp, you're going to go to what we call the east side. That's deeper water. There's not as much structure, but there is a big ledge and there have been fish kind of all the way up in there. There seems to be a bit of a higher concentration up off Eagle's Nest for that side of the lake. And, you know, then they're pretty scattered from Wildcat to Shrimp Island and Slough Point. I haven't gotten all the way up again to Pelican. I've been there twice checking that out. That water up there was pretty dirty, quite a bit cloudier, you know, due to the wind, you know, over the last few days. So we opted to save the gasoline and fish right by the dock and close, you know, close by and we're doing quite well. Wonderful, wonderful. When you're cleaning fish, is it minnows that are on the inside or minnows and then daphnia? It's daphnia, daphnia, and daphnia. One had five snails in it today and I had one on Monday that had four minnows and the rest was daphnia. Okay, and the daphnia, you can see it with the naked eye in the top of the water column? No, you can't. You can't see it. It's actually, when you do see it, it's hung up on your knots or your swivels or your clips on your, you know, on your terminal line. Okay. And it looks like a very clear kind of a blob. It's not very big. It's got a little black dot in it and the only time you can really, you know, if you want to find out if it's a daphnia, run it between your fingers and squish it and you'll feel the sandy gritty stuff in it. Gotcha, okay. So is orange, copper, red, that color spectrum, what works the best when the daphnia around? You know, it's working right now. I mean, it was red and gold all summer and they were still eating daphnia, you know, and then it went to perch and they're still eating daphnia. You know, a few times, you know, depending on location, you might get one with some minnows in them, but mostly it's all been daphnia. Everything, I've cut open every stomach and it's just daphnia and I was actually surprised to see five snails today. Now, does the daphnia disappear with real cold temperatures, you know, lake temperatures down say into the 40s? It hasn't on this lake. They're eating it, they're eating it all the way through February and now we're starting to warm up again, you know, by February. So yeah, no, it has become the prolific feed in Eagle Lake since the drought. Interesting, interesting. And the other interesting thing is that they eat algae. So is the increase of the daphnia due to the increase of the algae in the lake due to the drought? Kind of interesting, but they are our little filters and we'll keep them around. Okay, so hey, we're in a good time to start to be fishing at Eagle Lake. Air temperatures during the day, what 60s, 70s? Yeah, 60s, yeah, mid-70s if we're lucky. It's quite pleasant. I mean, we're dressing up pretty warm in the morning to cut that chill with the breeze, you know, and it's 28 degrees and you've got a little breeze, it's more like about 25. So, you know, bring gloves, be prepared and then just get ready to be in your t-shirt and, you know, flip-flops by 10 o'clock in the morning. Sounds like a great time. Val Aubrey, thank you. Now, the seminar that you did at the Marina Store is now on the Facebook page of the Marina Store, correct? That is correct. I'm sure you'll have to scroll down it. It'll be, what, September 4th, I believe it was, or 3rd. That Friday, yeah, and I do believe that it will disappear, you know, at some point, but I had some technical difficulties and the Marina Store employees, Gina pulled her phone out and started doing that and posting it, so we got it. And that was a big help to people when I had the technical difficulties and we're working on something to do for getting people educated on why this lake does what she does. Yes, all right. Val Aubrey, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us this evening and look forward to having you back on the program again. Awesome, thank you so much. All right, take care. We're up against our third commercial break of the evening. We'll be back after a word from our sponsors. The Beast of Moffy Bottom, a Sean the Sheep movie. Ooh, Prime Cinema presents movies on the big screen as they were meant to be seen at Del Oro and Sutton Cinemas, showing through September 24th at your Prime Cinemas. At the Del Oro, Resident Evil, rated R, Practical Magic 2, rated PG-13, and Spider-Man Brand New Day, rated PG-13. Now let's check on the Sutton, Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, rated PG-13, Sean the Sheep, The Beast of Mossy Bottom, rated PG, and Runner, rated PG-13, playing through September 24th at your local theaters. Now you know what's showing. Be sure to enjoy a movie on the big screen at Nevada County's two Prime Cinema theaters, the Sutton and the Del Oro. Rev up your weekend at the California Crossroads Car Show. Saturday, September 26th, the Crossroads Church parking lot comes alive with an incredible collection of cars and trucks, from classic American hot rods and vintage muscle cars to European classics, newer rides, and everything in between. Whether you're a serious collector, a weekend gearhead, or just love checking out beautiful cars, there's something for everyone. Bring the entire family. General admission is free. Enjoy the cars, family friendly activities, live music, kids zone, art show, great raffles, vendors, food, and more, all while supporting a great local cause, the Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital Cancer Center. Special thank you to our title sponsors, Grass Valley Provisions and Holtz Collision. Got a vehicle you'd love to show off? Cars and trucks of all years, foreign or domestic, are welcome, and registration is available online. It's the California Crossroads Car Show, Saturday, September 26th from 9 to 2 at Crossroads Church, 10042 Wolf Road in Grass Valley. Get all the details or register your ride at cccarshow.com. This is Dennis Pearce. We're back with the KNCO Fishing and Outdoor Report. I briefly mentioned Trinity River before we switched over and had Val Aubrey on the line talk with Tim Fox this afternoon. Tim, he's been guiding, he guides the Trinity River a lot, and he's been over there recently. He sent me a photo of one of his customers, or his clients, with a nice salmon he was holding up over there. But what's going on in the Trinity is this time of the year, typically, they take and ramp up the water flows there. The couple of different goals there is an Indian ceremony takes place downstream where they need a good amount of water for that, but also, simultaneously, they're trying to cool down the lower reaches of the Klamath River for water temp in order to get the salmon coming up. In years past, they've had that real bad heat and algae problem there that took out a lot of the fish. So, flushing it with water out of the Trinity is the solution for it, and that's what they have been doing. Tim sent me a message that about the 20th of the month is when they're going to start ramping down on the flows on it, but it has brought a lot of fish up the Trinity. General rule of thumb, if you've got high and rising water flows, the fish will move upstream. Stripers, salmon, steelhead, everything wants to migrate on a rising water level, and it brought a lot. But Tim's comment was that there was a heck of a lot of salmon up there on the Trinity. The neat thing about the Trinity is that it is a wadeable river, a walk and wade river. Yes, there are a lot of guys like Tim who drift it with their drift boat, but it's a shore angler's good fishery for both steelhead and salmon. It's a long trip to do it for a day, but with the weather we've currently got up here, camping out for the night, driving up one morning, fish in the afternoon, evening, camp out for the night, fish the morning through midday, and then drive home, it's going to be three hours. You need to allow three hours of driving to get up there. But if you get more than one person going up to split the gas costs these days, anyways, Trinity is fishing well, and the water's going to decline here in the near term, you know, within the week or so. But anyways, I wanted to encourage people that with the feather as high as it is, it's really tough to have a shore place to fish, but if you don't have a boat and are looking for some spot, making it a multi-day trip over to the Trinity works well. I mean, guys over there, you know, they're fishing eggs, they're fishing egg imitations, they throw spinners. But I remember when Tim Brady was over there running the Brady Sport Shop, Trinity Hotel, Weaverville Hotel, that he, there was a lot of spinners that he had there at his shop, and they were one of the prime things that he would be fishing over there, both for steelhead and for salmon. But anyways, give the Trinity a look. I had interesting conversations this week with Rob Ayers. Rob is a guide up on Lake Almanor, and things are, you know, water temp at Almanor has, that storm that we had, I guess it's been a couple weeks ago now, but the water temperature on the lake went from 74 down to 64 in just a few days. They had over an inch of rain up there, but the water temp, or the air temperature in the mornings is now down to the middle 40s, which is 15 degrees warmer than what you're going to find over at Eagle Lake, and those two places are not that far apart. But the amount of bait fish at Lake Almanor has been consistent year after year after year. I used to think that there were, you know, a lot of rise, that there were waves of, you know, a few years of a lot of pond smelt, and then they would sort of back off quantity-wise and come back. But for the last five or six years, it's just been pond smelt everywhere over there. But Rob sent me a photograph of his electronic fish finder screen, and the fish school, or the bait balls that were on his screen, were not to be believed. These things are huge. I mean, you can have a bait ball as big as a living room up to as big as a two-car garage over there. But that is what's making the fish, that's what he's catching the fish on, is pond smelt imitations. Like Val said, for Eagle Lake, bird watching is a good indicator of where the bait schools are and where the fish are. Now, Rob is more of a deeper water trolling guy. We had on our show a couple weeks ago, Mark Pilgrim, who's a bass angler, and this is his time of the year, his best top water bite of the year, is in September and into October. And now Rob is continuing to fish out over deep water. Yeah, looking for my notes that I set on that. But anyways, he fishes out over deep water, but Mark Pilgrim has been fishing, you know, five to eight to ten feet of water, doing his top water thing with basically a minnow imitation. And he's been getting mostly bass over there on the top water stuff, but he's catching two or three trout per day doing that, fishing in the shallows. Rob's out in deeper water fishing 10 to 15, sometimes 20 feet down, but both of them are doing well, catching fish. Rob sent me a photo of a very, very beautiful brown trout, nice big one that his customers had on, I think it was Wednesday or Thursday of this week. But anyways, good stuff going on over there. The other place I wanted to mention was Tom Page. I check in with Tom almost on a weekly basis because this time of the year he's on the lower Yuba five days a week, at least over there. Water clarity is crystal clear over there. Water flows have been real consistent. They've got a water agreement over there on the lower Yuba that prevents really radical up and down movements. If they're going to raise it up a bunch, they take it in gradual stair steps over there. Tom said this week he only saw about four to five salmon and the ones that he saw there on the Yuba were traveling fish. Now Tom's fishing from the Highway 20 bridge roughly down to Daguerre Dam or Sycamore Park, somewhere through that stretch, and he's not seeing a lot of salmon. What typically happens is the salmon come in and they go to the top of the river and sort of fill the river down. They take the best spawning places as far up as possible. So the fish are traveling through and the bulk of what has shown up is we're assuming is up above the bridge up there. I asked him if he had been fishing with eggs and he said he's tried it a couple of different times but the trout slash steelhead that are in there are not on an egg bite yet. Typically it's nymphs. He said first thing in the morning there are real small midges that are hatching on the river and he said that generally it's smaller fish that are feeding on those midges. The bigger, fatter, healthier ones are more into nymph fishing. He said there are sporadic caddis hatching off on the river but there's no real concentrated hatch where you can be fishing caddis dry flies and consistently catch fish. He said it's still a nymphing thing. Indicators and various types of nymphs and stuff down below. So that's primarily what he's got going there on the lower Yuba River. So we're not to the egg bite yet but hopefully we'll get something going here in the near future. One of the things I look for is if he's getting a lot of fish come up the Yuba that is a comment on what's coming up the feather. Although in the last couple of years the feathers done well in the Yuba has been sort of having its problems over there. All right we've been doing a public service announcement the last few weeks. There's an osprey that's being rehabilitated at the Hamilton Raptor Center in Penn Valley. The gentleman there is asking for donations of whole fish. A lot of people will say, oh I'll fillet it for the bird. No, what they want is they want the guts, they want the heads, the fins. They want an entire fish because the nutritional demands of an osprey and I think it's the same with eagles and other birds of prey. They're used to eating the entire fish and so what he's asking for is you catch a fish if you're coming by Penn Valley one way or the other. If you call them they'll give you directions on how to get there and you know any amount of whole fish and it doesn't matter the species. They're not strictly into trout fishing. They'll eat carp, they'll eat squaw fish, they'll eat a lot of different stuff. So anyways the phone number for the Hamilton Raptor Center is our area code 530 it's 575-1584. This is Dennis Pierce for the KNCO Fishing and Outdoor Report. Thanks for listening and we will be back here next Friday but the Friday after that I'm gone. I'm going up to the Puget Sound to go salmon fishing in Saltwater but we'll be back here next Friday evening the day before I leave. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. More fish than you. Many fish bites if you got good bait. Oh here's a little Hey Jim. I would like to relate. Many fish bites if you got good bait. Okay sounds good. Thank you. Perfect. I'll get Dennis out of here in that time. Okay. There's more priceless car show advice in six minutes here on KNCO Grass Valley Nevada City 106.9 FM and 8 30 a.m it's six --- end of transcript ---