Phil Lilley

@Travis Swift When you are going to be on Taney? I'll make sure to be around. Then there's @duckydoty too. Our small PJ 1/100th ounce jigs are pretty good too. I like the brown or sculpin/orange head. Sculpin/ginger brown head's been working good too. 6x is perfect. 5x is ok too but you'll get more bites especially if the water is flat, and it's been flat all week. Fishing's been stupid good for 3 weeks now. Average rainbow size/quality is the best I've seen in many years.

Just weighed a micro (1/256th oz). It's .0092 ounces. Someone do the math.

We sell them in our shop

Let's clean up the language.... symbols and all. Thanks

Lots of smallies, blue gills and goggleye around your dock!

The 5 and 6 gives you 5 different views: Superview, Wide, Medium and Linear and Narrow. So you don't have to stay with the fish eye look.

Nothing real exciting... edited out a lot of dead time. Did the best after the SD card filled up

Very nice.

Thing is that when people come from out of state on vacation and find out that 1. They need a boating license to operate a boat (born after 1984) or 2. Need a SS# to get a license to fish - they probably aren't going to know ahead of time and who carries their kid's SS# on vacation?

May be I should have mentioned.... I am going to throw 1/8th and 3/32nd ounce jigs but catching some pretty big, wild rainbows on the Naknek River in a few weeks. I have some Templefork spinning rods up there and they're ok but I need to take new ones up there. The average rainbow we catch up there in front of camp is about 22 inches. The rod needs a little backbone.

I'm looking for a good medium/light, 6-7 foot spinning rod that break down in two for air travel. If I can't find one, I'll tape 4 of my 6-foot Lilley's rods together and carry them on the plane. Ideas?

I just found this out from a post on our Facebook page... Not sure how I feel about it...

Just got off the lake. Boated above the Narrows about 8 a.m. and yes it was shallow. I dinged my prop a little having gotten over too far on the gravel bar. It happens. No generation, very little fog and no wind. There was a lot of pollen and leaves on the surface due to the wind front that went through this morning at 3 a.m.. Yes I was up.... someone thought if was funny to fire a volley of fireworks in our parking lot. No I didn't catch them. Disappointedly, there was very little surface action but I started with a red/gold #16 Zebra Midge under an indicator 12 inches and targeted the rising fish I saw. Caught a few rainbows. Switched to a spinning rod and threw a 1/16th ounce sculpin/ginger jig and caught several on as many cast. I was up there to fly fish though so I put the spinning rod down. But they were crushing the jig. Went to a #14 gray scud under an indicator, fishing 5 feet deep. Caught several more rainbows, nothing very big. By this time I was at the top of the Narrows. Fished the scud for a bit there and didn't do very well. It wasn't until I was down in the middle did I start getting any attention. Fished both the channel and the shallow flat side and caught a few. At the first downed tree there were a school of nice rainbows off the drop and caught a couple of them. Moved around Chuck Gries who was guiding a couple of people. They were catching fish on a beaded egg fly it looked like. I switched to a 1/125th ounce brown jig with an orange head, 4 feet deep, and started catch more rainbows. There was a good chop on the water which made a big difference. Continued to catch rainbows down another 150 yards. Sun was up and bright but it didn't matter. The chop was perfect and the fish bit well. Size of rainbows was pretty consistent - between 11 and 14 inches with most of them about 13 inches. Good shape, colorful. I used 2-pound line on the spinning and 6x tippet on the fly rod.

Love on your family and friends during this time... death brings healing and forgiveness at times where needed.

Generation has been fairly consistent, even on weekends lately. Operators at the dam have been leaving the water off until about noon to 1 p.m. and then kicking it on and running anywhere from two to four units at 6,800 to 12,000 cubic feet per second. It's been pretty hot in the afternoons here, so I'm sure they're running a lot of water for a high power demand. It's back off by 8 p.m. each evening and off all night. We've noticed that they've been drawing the lake down overnight, so in the mornings the lake is unusually low. This is not supposed to happen, but it does occasionally. You will not see any variation in the official lake level at the base of the dam, but you will see it below Lookout and down lake. Duane Doty told me today that the lake level at the narrows is so low that the channel is less than 10 feet wide and very shallow, barely enough water to boat up past it. So be careful when boating under these conditions. Water temperature is holding at about 48 degrees and clear. When they run water, of course, it gets murky and blows out algae that's grown on the bottom of the upper lake. It all clears out in about hour after it starts. Two things we want to report about our rainbows -- there are a lot of them in the lake and they are bigger than normal. They are both longer and thicker than newly stocked trout of the past. Of course, this is great news for all anglers fishing the lake right now. But, of course, it's still "fishing" and not "catching." Some days are better than others as far as catching numbers and size, but overall it's been very good. Our rainbows are still wanting to chase something, especially early in the mornings. Spoons and spinners are working good, either throwing and reeling them in or trolling behind the boat. Duane's been trolling his crank baits and doing well, landing seven trout longer than 20 inches and losing eight at the boat just in the last week. He's also been throwing stick baits on quite a few guide trips -- after writing and posting his article, Committing to a Big Brown, about catching so many big brown trout using these methods. The Berkely Pink PowerWorm is still a must for anyone struggling to catch fish. I can't stress enough how well this works. Fish it four- to five-feet deep early in the morning, and then move it deeper as the sun gets higher in the sky, seven-to eight-feet deep. Use two-pound line as tippet for more bites, but four-pound is okay. Small marabou jigs are catching big numbers of rainbows below and above Fall Creek in the mornings. I boated up to the Lookout Island area early Saturday morning and threw sculpin/ginger and sculpin/peach 1/16th-ounce jigs using two-pound line and boated several dozen rainbows in the 11- to 15-inch range. Later in the afternoon, after the water starts running, we're throwing 1/8-ounce white jigs below the dam and all the way down past Fall Creek and hooking good rainbows. Guide Bill Babler reported fishing above the Narrows this week using the jig-and-float method with either a sculpin or ginger micro jig, two-pound tippet. He's caught good numbers of rainbows. I haven't been up there yet to try it, but with the water so low above the Narrows, boating up and wading this area should be excellent. If I get up there, I'll fish a #16 to #18 weighted gray scud or a San Juan Worm or a Mega Worm and probably will try a Zebra Midge and a soft hackle if they are rising on midges. I've been told there are big numbers of rainbows in the Narrows, and the stretch is full of freshwater shrimp. Wading below the dam, I'd use the same flies. I saw on a forum post where a friend fished up these on Saturday morning and caught more than 50 rainbows on mainly small midge flies. View full article

Tough duty...

Get MLB TV - can't listen to games because it's considered an in-market game. Anyone find a place to listen to a game online?

The trout are biting. That's about all I need to say really. I sent 2 guys I grew up with out yesterday at 3 p.m. - bright sun and they had just started running 2 units. The lake was starting to fill up with green slim moss from the generation startup. Gave them my Pink Worm rods and told them to start at Cooper Creek, float down. They caught a lot of rainbows. Their brother arrived at 5 p.m.. They went back out and caught even more rainbows. Then it started raining. Big downpour for 25 minutes... just ask Duckydoty about it I took these guys fishing this morning. We left at 6 a.m. and headed to Lookout in the fog. No generation. It really wasn't too bad and there weren't many boats out yet. I had 4 rods rigged with 2-pound line and 1/16th ounce jigs. They hadn't jigged fish much. We had doubles and a few triples all morning -- worked our way down to Fall Creek. Caught rainbows the whole way down - lost track of how many. Nothing really over 15 inches until we got below the Narrows - bigger fish there. Had a few up to 17 inches. I hadn't done that in a long time... worked that whole area with the water off throwing small jigs. They wanted sculpin/ginger or peach... no dark only colors. And white was just ok. They really liked the dark/light combo. View full article

In the past couple of years, they've gone from leaving the water off part of the day and running water hard during peak power times to this minimum flow and bump it up a bit in the afternoons/evenings. That's been the general pattern... not like it used to be. Not good for waders below the dam for sure. Good for boaters.

Cool!

I guess a grub swam on about any gravel bank is producing lots of fish. I just wish I could pull myself away from these HUGE brown trout and go over and fight a few cousin brownies up there!