Species: Brown Bullhead (Ameiurus nebulosus) Location: Topsy Reservoir, OR Date: May 29, 2009 If pigeons are rats with wings, bullheads are rats with fins. For whatever reason, Brown Bullhead catfish have established themselves as the invasive every real angler loves to hate in almost every major basin across the country. Oregon is no different. Why someone would ever decide…
Species: White Crappie (Pomoxis annularis) Location: Gerber Reservoir Date: July 15, 2007 If you’ve kept up with this blog, you probably know that I started keeping fishing journals when I was 14. Let’s be real. I’m quite confident in my writing abilities now, but my early teenage prose wasn’t always the best. Still, as I look back, a…
Species: Green Sunfish (Lepomis cyanellus) Location: Lost Creek Lake, OR Date: July 27, 2005 Every day, we woke up and went on a run. We’d come back, grab breakfast, do some sort of running game, take a break, and run again. Lunch would come around, we’d have a short reprieve for the afternoon, then we’d go on an evening…
Species: Pumpkinseed (Lepomis gibbosus) Location: Lost River, OR Date: June 18, 2005 Lost River is so named because it bubbles up out of the ground, wanders around for 60 miles, then goes back into the ground not far from its origin. It is rumored to have once held a great Redband Trout fishery, but those days are decades…
Species: Black Crappie (Pomoxis nigromaculatus) Location: Hoover Ponds, OR Date: March 22, 2005 Geez, I didn’t fish much back then. I hadn’t wet a line since the previous October. In my journal, a 14-year-old Luke wrote: “I fought the fish close to shore. Thinking it was a perch, I didn’t pay much attention to it; however, I soon saw…
Species: Yellow Perch (Perca flavescens) Location: Hoover Ponds, OR Date: July 31, 2004 The Bluegill were lined up in the shallows, but slightly larger, more insidious fish skirted the edge of visibility, feinting in and out of the shadows in a cruel tease. I had no idea what they were, but Dad thought they might be perch….
Species: Bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus) Location: Hoover Ponds, OR Date: July 31, 2004 Baseball is like Trump’s Twitter: hard to watch. For that reason, I decided to take a break from my brother’s game in White City to walk around. As I neared the back fence, I caught sight of a pond. It wasn’t large, but I saw…
Big Butte Creek, Little Butte Creek, Medco Pond, Willow Lake, OR Trip Date: August 5, 2011 “A good plan implemented today, is better than the perfect plan implemented tomorrow.” General George S. Patton’s words should be taken to heart in our daily lives, but are especially true when it comes to fishing. Research and reading are incredibly important, but…
