Whenever Donna and I spend quality time at Tahoe like these last five days, I like to plan three fishing outings between our time watching movies on TV, playing cards, reading, tying flies, needle work, visiting casinos, taking side trips into Reno or cooking—especially for friends who come to visit.
The first is to spend a late afternoon float tube fishing at what's left of Martis Creek Lake near Truckee. This for me is fishing the surface with blood midge patterns for trout.
The second is to go lake fishing on Tahoe as I did on Tuesday with Mickie, who charters "Big Mach" out of Carnelian Bay on the lake ($55 credit card or $50 cash with fishing license). Mickie has been fishing Tahoe since 1952. You go out at 4:30 AM in the morning and are usually back by 10:30 AM. This fishing is not with fly lines, but monel metal lines fished deep—sometimes as deep as five hundred feet. The four fishermen who went out Tuesday morning all got their limit of two mackinaw trout. Most fish under twenty inches are tagged and released by Mickie after the air is let out of their air bladder, which expands because the fish come up from so deep. Mickie has caught some fish he tagged as much as seventeen years back. My fish were twenty-three and twenty-two inches, and ended up that evening filleted out, broiled, and served to dinner guests that evening.
The third outing I do is on my way home. About forty-four miles from our place at Incline Village, Highway 20 cuts off of Highway 80, leading to Nevada City or Grass Valley. After 4.1 miles on Hwy 20 you come to Bowman Lake Road (Forest Service road #18). Four miles in on this road you reach Fuller Lake, which has good trout fishing. It is fed from Bowman Lake with very cold water. One-half mile farther you come to Rucker Lake, a lake that trout can't live in because the water sometimes gets as high as seventy-five degrees during the summer as it has no year round cold water source. That is why this high mountain lake only has warm water species like large-mouth bass, bluegill, and the bluegill's cousin, the warmouth bass. Even though the lake freezes over in the winter, the fish make it through just fine. Most access to Rucker is off of private property. My wife and I had met and visited with some people who live on the lake a few years back. I've had access to fishing ever since. One of these days I'll explore around the lake to find if there is a public access area. Late June and July are the best times to fish Rucker, but I wanted to try late May to see if it was too early for some surface action.
Donna stayed at Incline, planning to go home with one of our sons and his family on Monday. I wanted to be home before the week-end outing at Kistler, so on my way home from Tahoe Thursday I stopped at Rucker Lake for four hours of float tube fishing. I had a great day catching twenty bass in the ten to fifteen inch range and one warmouth—all caught with my flyrod using a foam black beetle or a balsa frog popper. I was told the lake was too cold for surface action at this time of year, but such was not the case. I think it is only because a lot of people aren't very successful at popper fishing so don't try it as much as other types of fishing. I'm addicted to it so it seems easy to me now. Then it was time to get home and prepare for the Kistler Fishout Saturday, another great place for popper fishing for bass.