2019 RAW Results

[Phil Lilley]

Great day to be on the water... and fishing was decent for most.  No big stringers, no real big trout.  Close place finishers made it a competitive contest for all.

[Seth]

It was an awesome day out on the water and the fish cooperated as well. I was happy with 7.55 considering our best fish wasn't much over a pound, but it sure would have been nice to find one of those 2+ pounders that were being caught all around us. We'll get that kicker one of these days!

We fished between Fall Creek on down to the bend just below the old Riverlake docks all day. I threw sculpin/ginger and black jigs the entire time and dad drifted with minnows in the back of the boat. Dad fished night crawlers for a while as well, but the fish showed zero interest. Our total fish caught was in the 40-50 range, with probably a half dozen of those being 13-15" browns. The bite was fairly steady all day, but our better fish came later in the day.

Now for a fish story. Dad had never tried minnows and wanted to give them a try Friday so we stopped in at Lilley's and picked up a few dozen before we started fishing. We ran up to Fall Creek and started drifting down stream. He was getting bit often enough that he couldn't fish with two rods. We were probably 100-150 yards above Short Creek near the middle of the lake and he hooked in to something huge. Whatever it was ran around like crazy for a few moments and then became slow and heavy as it headed for the docks and just slowly swam up stream. After several minutes of chasing it down on the trolling motor and keeping the rod down low to prevent the fish from getting caught on the docks, it found a big tree in between some docks. One tree made a perfect arch between the top and the root wad and that fish swam right through it and then turned and kept heading upstream. There was no way for us to get it untangled and eventually we just had to break the line. I've caught rainbows up to 10# and watched dad and several others catch browns up to almost 6# and we've never had anything do that to us down there on Taneycomo. Dad even landed a 20# carp that he hooked on a night crawler off of Lazy Valleys dock many years ago that didn't feel like whatever this was. I can't imagine it was anything besides a big brown considering the area and the fact that it ate a pretty good sized minnow, but we'll never know for sure since we never got a glimpse of it. Whatever it was definitely had a game plan as soon as it was hooked and knew right where all that wood was. At one point, we were almost right on top of it, but I couldn't see down in to the water well enough to make anything out due to the cloud cover.

I thought I had the fight all on GoPro as well, but I forgot that I had turned my looping mode down to 5 minutes instead of leaving it on 20 minutes so all I had footage of was us trying to get the line free from the tree.