12-14-2017, 04:22 AM
I've been at Bear Lake for over 26 years. This year was the best weather I can ever recall during the Bonneville WF run. It is BY FAR the most fishing pressure I have ever seen during the run. It was not uncommon to have 5-8 boats on most of the productive areas. Too many people running their electric trolling motors in the shallow water that the fish were pretty spooked. Have people caught WF? You bet. Lots of them. It is/was harder to limit out this year, but you could do it if knew what you were doing. I had friends the fished BL the last two days and although they did not limit (20 fish between two of them) they came close and they are not the best anglers 15 one day and 17 the next. Overall, the WF run has been very good with LOTS of angler pressure (mainly due to the tournament that was going on). Some tournament anglers had zero etiquette, but that's anther story. Oh, one thing that has been VERY overlooked this year is jigging on the "rockpile" with castmasters in about 48' of water. That was productive for WF too. I also had several anglers report they caught some big lakers and some really big cutthroat trout while fishing for WF. I know we picked up several. So, this year has been very good overall. Is it a little tougher to catch a limit, yes.....but it was almost not fair to the WF the last several years when the lake was really low and all the WF were very concentrated on the little bit of rocky habitat that was still covered with water. Its always much nicer to be up at Bear Lake than inhaling the SMOG in Logan, Ogden or SLC as I did the last two days. (cough, cough).
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