Drilling holes and dropping lines

A colder than usual winter calls for drastic measures, still waters...ice augers...worms..minnows... power bait, jigs and thirty inches of ice.... I had only fly fished Crows Nest Lake twice over the years as I have become exclusively a river fisherman over the years... My first row out onto the lake in my old dory, was on a rainy evening a few years ago. I netted myself a 10 -11 lb. lake trout on the fly...caught on a steep drop off, that fish peeled line from the reel from 10 ft. to 90 ft. in seconds ..... a memorable moment not to be recreated on the ice that day... in fact, where we hiked in was not exactly where we wanted to fish , but it was out of the wind so we drilled half a dozen holes each and could not find water over 20 ft. We were hoping for around a hundred ft. It was pretty slow fishing the bites were light except for what ever hit Gary's one rod ..the rod and holder almost went down the hole...that was the big excitement for the afternoon. A quick road trip to the West Coast happened with my old fishing buddy from Banff, Rolfe Furhmann , A good trip was had , but we sure have mellowed with age... The spey rod went along, but all the fishing was out on the Pacific at Pedder Bay a couple of Spring Salmon were caught at 169 ft. on the down riggers ..I saw killler whales for the first time.. very cool !! There was lots of snow on Vancouver Island .. every day the temp. went up, the snow up high melted and the rivers went up again.. The Vedder River was cleaning up on the trip home,it had colour still, but it,s greenish and resonable flow...steelhead are in ! Other than that, a few fly fishing afternoons have been had on the Crow... nothing special to report ,midges and not many of them..the March full moon phase will soon be over and hopefully this will be the last of the nasty cold spells for the southern part of the rockies and the fish will start to wag their tales a little harder. A few people have come into the shop and bought some of our size 20# midge patterns and heading out...in a few weeks the small winter stones will officially start off a new season of fly fishing.. so don't hurt yourself skiing!