Tail Lake
July 16, 2022
Trip leader, Dan, and his wife Karen welcomed co-leader Jayne, Brian/BFF President, and BFF members Carol and Anita, to Washington Lake at noon. After signing BFF waivers, we easily hiked one mile along one side of Washington Reservoir to Tail Lake, an ‘attached’ natural lake. Upon our arrival all of the lake’s five species of fishes were feeding, and we landed three of the five in the first hour with Jayne doing best, landing a nice tiger trout and several brookies.
Because we were exposed to so many species, we agreed to an informal fishing contest of who could land the most different fish. After Dan gave everyone one of his unique ‘rubber band flies’ we all fished the length of that lake and agreed to fish the beautiful natural lake, Shadow, a short hike upstream. Shadow has always been a challenging fishery and Karen was the only angler to land a fish there, a beautiful 12-inch male brookie.
Upon our return downstream to Tail, fishing our way back toward our cars, we ran into a one-hour bite and Jayne landed an arctic grayling to win our species contest with three species and several of us right behind her with two.
By the time we all headed back to our cars, everyone had caught and released various fishes. The weather was unbelievably comfortable in the face of stifling 100+ degrees back in the valley, with only a few mosquitoes. Dan had broken a rib a few days before the trip and couldn’t use a fly rod as much as he wanted, but found a few edible wild mushrooms and was entertained by the nesting Washington Lake bald eagles. All of us were entertained by the vast numbers and diversity of other recreational users in the area, but didn’t suffer from any competition with the relatively few anglers.
Thanks everyone for such a fun, relaxing day Dan.
