Joe's Valley Adventure

I was kicking around the idea of returning to the lake where I caught those huge tigers the last couple of weeks, but after two weeks of wrestling tiger trout in, I wanted a change of pace. So I got a hold of my buddy Justin (look at his write up of this trip on his site!) and we decided to take a trip out to Joe's Valley reservoir and get into some of the hot fall splake action.

On the way there, we drove through Straight Canyon, and had to stop and fish that creek right there. I didn't get pictures of the fish that I caught (just two small browns) but I snapped this one of Justin holding a nice brown for that stretch of water.

This stream is incredible. We hit it on the way to Joe's Valley and on the way home. The scenery here is absolutely breathtaking. 

Anyways, the main attraction of this trip was to get into some splake. After the recent DWR gill net survey turned up splake in the 5-7 pound class, I was excited to possibly hook into some more decent fish. When Justin and I finally got ourselves away from the fun browns in Straight Canyon Creek, we ended up looking out over the entire reservoir from the dam. 

We had the entire aquamarine lake to ourselves. Seeing the surface of Joe's completely smooth didn't last very long, though. The wind picked up almost as soon as we got down to the shore, but not before we were able to nail a couple of nice splake. We were fishing with Gulp minnows and honestly, we had a fish just about every cast. The first spot I tried gave me a steady stream of splake that were feisty and pretty. 

Once the wind picked up, I moved into a corner of the reservoir and kept nailing little splake, all in the 10-13 inch range. While I was over here, I was in the middle of putting a new minnow on my jig head when I heard a huge splash. I looked up just in time to see a huge red tail fin disappear back into the water. Knowing that Joe's has a very healthy population of tiger muskie, and knowing that their tails get red at times, I'm pretty confident in saying I saw a very large tiger muskie today. It could have been a massive splake, though. But I wanna believe it was a tiger muskie! 

I kept fishing that spot for a while, and the only fish of note was this pale cutt. First cutt I've ever caught from Joe's! 

After that cutt, we caught a few more splake before deciding to head home. On the way, we stopped in Straight Canyon Creek again, but couldn't pull a fish out of any of the holes. It was weird, because all the holes were gorgeous. 

Anyways, on the way home, we got sidetracked yet again and Justin decided to show me a great little hidey-hole of his that's full of cutts. We got in there right as the sun was setting (I was wearing tennis shoes and had to splash through ankle deep muck for these fish!) and threw out some more Gulp minnows. First cast, this little guy came to hand. 

Justin caught another one of similar size, and I had a few more bites, but nothing else came out of that little pond. So, after a full day of fishing, we decided to finally head home. Between the two of us, we probably caught anywhere between 40-50 fish. We were too busy unhooking splake after splake taht keeping count kind of lost its importance! 

Anyways, next weekend I'm looking at tackling the Berry. Stay tuned for that report!