Reservation waters warming
Anglers received an icy reception at Twin Lakes on April 8 for the opening of the trout fishing season on the Colville Indian Reservation.
“The lakes were still mostly iced over,” said Jerry Marco, fish biologist for the Colville Confederated Tribes. But that only means there will be a lot more big rainbows and brook trout, not to mention largemouth bass, available for anglers as the waters west of Inchelium get warmer this month.
Anglers who had made opening-day reservations on the Twins at Log Cabin and Rainbow Beach resorts simply drove an hour east to lower elevations at 500-acre Buffalo Lake north of Grand Coulee. There they had little trouble caching limits, Marco said.
McGinnis Lake, which is near Buffalo, is popular with anglers targeting brook trout.
“The brookies run 12-18 inches,” Marco said. “The best fishing is in the spring until the action dies down in the hot summer around late July. But it picks up again after Labor Day until the lakes close at the end of October,” he said.
The Twin Lakes, at nearly 1,000 acres each, are among the largest lake fisheries on the reservation, which has a reputation for producing large trout.
Omak Lake, at 3,600 acres, is the biggest lake with the biggest bragging rights. The Washington state record 18-pound Lahontan cutthroat was caught there in 1993.
“It’s a great fishery that’s pretty underrated,” Marco said. “It has a year-round season, but the fly fishers in particular like to bring their pontoon boats in the spring during the March 1–May 31 catch-and-release season. There’s a lot of fish swimming around the shore looking for a place to spawn. They don’t have any success spawning there, but you see a lot of them around the two inflows at the north and south ends of the lake.”
Outside the catch-and-release season, Omak has a three-fish limit with no more than one trout over 18 inches.
The biggest fish tend to be caught during summer when the fish are deep and anglers use downriggers, Marco said.
Smaller reservation fishing lakes include Little Goose and Big Goose in the Omak area. Little Goose may have had some winter kill, he said, but it will be restocked by mid-May. Big Goose is shallow with a good largemouth bass fishery.
On the east side of the reservation are Nicholas and Bourgeau, two small rainbow lakes. Nicholas, as well as LaFleur Lake, which is near Inchelium, are off the beaten trail and don’t open until the first Saturday in May.
The tribe produces fish at its own hatchery on the southwest corner of the reservation. Brook trout brood stock come from Owhi Lake, which is open only to tribal members.
The hatchery this spring holds promise for anglers in the form of “800,000 redband trout eggs from a reservation strain that’s received rave reviews for their genetic purity,” Marco said.
“We’ll be transitioning from a hatchery rainbow program to using our native red-band, which will allow us to eventually stock a few more fish into our streams, like the Sanpoil River,” he said.