This isn't so much a fishing report as a celebration of getting back on the water after a 2 month lay off due to knee surgery.
For the first time in what seems like a week, we didn't have rain in the Spokane area. Lucky for me it coincided with my day off so I decided to day was the day to ditch the knee rehab and go have some fun. Since I am still limited to what I can do and river wading/rough terrain is out of the question, that left me with lakes and Amber was the closest to my house. I grabbed lunch and off I went. One can usually gauge how well they are going to do at Amber by counting the number of fish/strikes they have going from the boat launch to the little bay across the lake. On a great day you may have 6 by the time you get there. Today I had zero. Bad sign. I switched from a olive bugger to a black bugger and went from all my line out to about half of my full sink III. Almost immediately I got a gentle strike followed by another tap. I quit rowing and fed the fish some line to imitate the leach curling up but the fish didn't come back for thirds. I started moving again and got a good take but my reaction time was too slow and the fish was off by the time I grabbed my rod. A few oar strokes later I landed a fat 16 inch triploid. Then it went totally dead for the next hour. Go figure. I had one more strike on but that was it for the two hours I could tolerate sitting in my little row boat. There were two other boats on the lake but I didn't observe anybody else land a fish. On an interesting side note, last year the fish in Amber got sick with some type of parasite that burrowed into their side. Many fish were lost and the first half of the year was pretty slow until the surviving fish got over the infection. I haven't fished Amber a lot this year but had yet to see any ill looking fish. The fish I released might have had one of the parasites in its side or it could have been a missing scale/scar. I didn't see the spot until the fish was falling back in the water. If anybody else has come across anything like this anytime this year I would like to hear about it. Mike Spangle, WA
