<Better late than never, right?>

What a great time!  Big props to Pacific Outfitters for hosting such a fine tournament.  I loved the entire setup: great pre-tourney meeting to get people jazzed, a huge bevy of great prizes (the goodie bags were awesome!), and a very fun potluck/awards ceremony.  I ESPECIALLY loved the team-tourney aspect, as it opened up a host of possibilities for strategizing.  I hope the team-tourney format is adopted again next year!


MattSwayze and I had a plan along the lines of this: Matt would focus on the big species like lings and cabs, while I’d focus on the smaller species like greenling and rockfish.  It worked like a charm.  Matt stuck some really awesome fish using large baits.  Matt’s fish included two personal bests: a 37 inch ling and a 25 inch cabezon!





A visit by Cab Master Kiet!

Seeing Matt catch those big, “showy” fish made it VERY tempting to bust out the big guns for lings, but I stuck with the plan and used only my smaller jigs the entire day.  I caught a TON of black rockfish in the 15-19 inch range, and some dandy kelp greenling over 16 inches in length.  A 16 inch greenling was equivalent to an almost 30 inch ling, so it was one of those few days where I was really stoked to catch greenling!


Back at the launch, Matt and I sorted through our fish trying to figure out which ones were worth the most points.  My damn pocket calculator went kaput on me, and we didn’t have a pen+paper, so it was a guessing game.  We ended up turning in the big ling, big cab, two 16+ inch greenling, and two large black rockfish.  On the drive back to Matt’s house, I suddenly remembered that Matt had also caught a 28 inch ling.  Turns out the 28 inch was worth 24 more points than one of the blacks we’d turned in!!  If we’d realized that at the beach it would’ve bumped us into 2nd place.  I was kicking myself a thousand times over for overlooking that.  But in the end, we actually preferred the BBQ/helmet camera/hotel package over the poker tourney package, so we were totally fine with taking third place due to a foolish arithmetic mistake on our part.

Thanks again to all those at PacOut and all the sponsors who came in to make this tourney such a great time.  The weather was awesome and the camaraderie was (as always with NCKAers) unparalleled.  Props to Boyce, Cameron, Rob, and Adam for taking the top spots!  You guys are kickass fishermen!
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Oh yeah: Matt and I fished the Trinity River Thursday evening and Friday morning before the tournament.  I also fished it on the drive back Sunday evening.  We didn’t get many, but we stuck a few!  Love that river.  It’s worth a stop if you’re cruising Hwy 299.

Nice fish there guys! Its starting to look like I wont make a trinity trip this month but maybe early to mid next month.

Thanks for another great report and fish porns Chris.

Plus that ride on 299 out to the coast is flat out EPIC.

Thanks for the props fellas.  I know, this is probably the least picture-heavy report I've ever done.  But I was "in it to win it" with the tourney.

Nice, the trinity flows are being bumped up to 3400cfs for a few days. Hopefully get some fish moving. It's going to packed with WW guys and rafts for sure this weekend.

Yeah, I was planning on doing a float on it this weekend for my birthday, but then a couple days ago I saw the flows go up.  So no Trinity this weekend, but like you I'm hoping it'll get some more fish upriver.  They weren't exactly stacked in there last week.

Guess I'll have to do a little Almanor fishing tomorrow instead and start drawing a bead on the fall bite...

They are stacked in the Klamath above weitchepec, great steelhead reports out of there. Ran the trinity today, 3400 is pumping, big boily water with tough eddy lines. Pretty silted up as well. Anyone know when they are going to ramp it down? They can't let out too much or the damn will collapse, and I think they are still diverting 600cfs to whiskeytown.

Sweet!  I haven't done a Klamath trip in a while.  I really like that stretch below Orleans.  According to the Trinity hydrograph, they'll start lowering the flows Tuesday morning.