Another tough day on the Columbia

pdxfisher · September 8, 2021

I hit the big C on Friday, September 3rd in hopes of having a killer day. That did not happen. It was a grind all day long. I had a few brief flurries of action and even some back-to-back fish but there was a whole lot of just casting in between. Wind was a bit of an issue with it being windier than forecast. Some white caps out of the East in the morning and some white caps out of the West in the afternoon. It was dead calm for a few hours in the middle which was really nice.

The shad fry out-migration seems to be in full swing. There were tons of fry jumping around near the shore and I was marking massive schools of bait out over deeper water. I am sure that amount of bait played some role in my difficulties. The other thing that was even tougher to deal with was the amount of algae and pieces of weed that were floating around. With the ripple on the surface I could not see it and a lot of my casts came back all gunked up. Very frustrating but I am not sure what to do in that situation.

I started the day tossing a Choppo and caught a small one and lost a decent one pretty quickly. "Everything is going according to plan", I chuckled evilly to myself. However just like in the movies, when the evil villain gets over confident their plans turn to ruin. After those first two quick bites I went a long time with no action. I moved spots a couple of times when I finally caught my second bass (another small one) and on the next cast I hooked and lost a decent size (~2lb) on the jump. However, that was it for that spot.

How does it go from back to back bites to crickets? Asking for a friend

Well I kept grinding away and finally found a spot of 15-20' rocky bottom where I was marking fish on the bottom. I hit that spot hard with a drop shot and caught quite a few fish in a short while, but only a few may have been a pound (and most well under a pound). That was at least a whole lot better than the casting practice I had being doing. I did try to see if I could coax a better fish with a wobble-head jig and a creature bait but the Columbia decided steal that lure from me within a few casts so I just went back to the drop shot.

After that flurry of action the East wind finally died and I moved out to a spot that had been good to me over the summer. I kept switching between lures and depths when I saw a nice smallmouth come up and look at my Choppo and turn away (it was dead calm and sunny). I stopped the Choppo and it turned back towards it. When I restarted it, kapow! I had my best fish of the day (1lb 15oz, nothing to write home about but better than a treble in the hand). The fish put up a good fight and I was feeling really rejuvenated by that bite.

I stayed on that spot for a while. I would occasionally see a fish splash here or there in the area but never consistently. Very random. I just kept covering that area with different baits and different depths when I hooked a really nice bass on a swimbait. It was so fast. It hit and I reeled like crazy trying to catch up to that fish and I don't think I had a good hook set or good pressure on it. It jumped to the side of the kayak and was gone.

Back to grind, grind, grind but no more bites in that area. I decided to pedal upstream a ways and fish some new stuff. Almost as soon as I started out the dead calm was replaced by a wind building from the West. By the time I got up around where I wanted to fish there were small rollers and white caps across most of the river. I tried throwing a variety of lures and did miss a couple and finally catch on on the Choppo. However the weed/algae problem seemed even worse up this way (I was hoping that was going to improve). After a bit of casting, reeling and cleaning off my lure I decided to call it a day.

It was not a total bust but the bite was much slower than I had anticipated. I ended up with 17 bass, but that was over a 10 hour period, and nothing over 2lbs. I fished my hardest but overall the Columbia was not impressed. I think all that algae and all those shad are making for some tough conditions. I have not fished the Columbia during the shad fry out migration in the past but had read it can make the fishing tough. I can certainly add my support to that theory.

I did not take any pics on the day but here some video footage.