I got that work!

Another weekend, another cannon ball run to the Pere Marquette river. As the season winds down I made hopefully not my last of 12 trips to the PM/LM this year, and it was probably the best of the year. I met my fishing partner Ryan at our usual M59/US23 parking lot at 3am on Saturday morning to make the drive up. After 3 hours of awesome radio and red bull we got into Baldwin around 6am and headed straight for BBT. Picked up a few necessities, arranged a car spot, got out room keys, and went straight to the river. Wanting to avoid the insane number of people up north this weekend we went down to the lower/mid waters. Besides the walk in areas along the drift the Lower to Walhalla stretch was pretty much 6 or 7 drift boats besides us. Met a really solid 2 man crew of older fishermen that we played leap frog with all day. It was nice to see a couple 60 something guys throwing their drift boat over the guard rail at Lower, made me laugh as I thought the young guys were the only ones that did that. We beat the boats down to a couple holes that always seem to have guides on them but the fish just werent in there. For this stretch it seemed the fish were strictly on the redds or deep shoots next to them. I really dont like fishing redds but I dislike not catching fish even more so we gave in. Logmark area and Mapleleaf had tons of fish on the redds and even more people. Luckily we found a nice area just past Mapleleaf between Barothy's that had a great number of fish in it. Mixed up technique and flies with great results/patience. We actually pissed off enough salmon to get them to bite. Hooked into nearly 30 fish between the two of us and actually landed 6 fair hooked ones. Overall a really good day, but really tired as we both havent went to sleep in a day or so.

Sunday we wanted to a shorter drift so we went down to Rainbow to Sulak. Not many people on that stretch except for the usual guides that have to drop in a Macdougals. Fishing was really slow and we nearly got skunked. But thankfully we found a deep hole near the end of the drift with an amazing number (60 to 70) of FRESH salmon in it. One of the best days I have had in years. The hole was covered in shade and leaves so it really helped in hiding our lines. If it wasnt for the giant log running down the backside (salmon magnet) we would of landed more but still ended up with 5 or 6 each. Overall a really sucessful weekend if it ends up being my last for salmon. Met a few groups of really nice people which made fishing even more fun. Hopefully we will get one more run and I will get another weekend away from home.