Oregon bird hunting

Larry Hutchens pointed across the water to a place designated Fishneyland on his Lowrance GPS.

“This section of river has so little fishing pressure, I’m sure there’s bass up here that have never seen a lure.”

We were fishing the Columbia at Ed Iman’s annual Fish Camp, but the same thing could be said of the Snake River impoundment near Tri-Cities, Lake Sacajawea, where we had fished for the first leg of our trip.

There my wife, Merrilee, had run the twin motors on the big River Ranch Houseboats, while Terry Sheely and I cast crankbaits at the shoreline. On our second night, we docked at a place called Fishhook Park and caught 1 1/2 nightcrawlers by flashlight. Sheely remarked how fast the nightcrawlers were. You’d be fast too, if you were a worm at a place called Fishhook Park.

Now, on the Columbia upstream from Arlington, Hutchens, a tournament bass fisherman, Bill Follmar, of Folbe Rod Holders, and I raced across the water. Hutchens watched for birds keying on baby shad. If the birds are on the shad, the fish are too.

“This time of year there’s so much bait in the water, for the topwater fisherman, the time to fish is now,” Hutchens said.

Hutchens and I cast big white topwater plugs at the shore and “walked the dog” back to the boat, while Follmar cast and retrieved a blue-backed silver Reaction Strike crankbait. It was only Follmar’s second bass trip of his life, but he seemed to have picked up on the right way to catch fish on this particular day. He didn’t say much, but the salmon fisherman from Seattle started pulling fish to the boat.

At the place Hutchens calls Fishneyland, we found a rocky outcrop that juts up beneath the surface, one of a thousand such places on the Columbia, where baitfish congregate and bass wait for them in ambush.

October is one of Hutchens’ favorite fishing months on the mid-Columbia.

“You go in the fall and there is no wind. It’s so much easier to fish, you’re not being bounced around on the waves.”

Like all good bass fishermen, Hutchens is an optimist.

Hutchens and I changed baits often, while Follmar stuck with his blue-backed crank. Hutchens and Follmar outfished me. When I could count seven bass to my credit, they had at least 15 apiece.

Early in the afternoon, we stowed our Lamiglas rods and ran back to camp. I was already looking forward to the next trip, the annual Prineville Merchants Tournament, hosted by the Central Oregon Bass Club.

Prineville Reservoir is another place where there is so much water a bass could go a year without seeing an angler’s bait. And this is one of the best times of the year to go. Largemouth and smallmouth bass stack along cliff walls and outcrops, and a well-presented finesse bait can spark 50 strikes a day. We fished Senko plastics with sliding sinkers.

Steve Oakley ran the boat I fished in, while Duane Jackson took my teammate, John Skelly, in his boat. Skelly had the hot hand and caught the four biggest bass that made up our total bag of five.

We weighed in at 5.86 pounds with John’s biggest smallmouth, a 1.94-pound fish, placing second in overall big smallmouth for the day.

The top team fished with JL Neal of JL Drywall. Cory Fields and Howard Curtis boated a five-fish bag that totaled 10.5 pounds. John Weisner, of Weisner Automotive, ran the boat for the second-place finishers, Neil Bishop and John Neal, who weighed in with 7.12 pounds.

The team that fished with COBC angler of the year Kevin Pangle, of Evergreen Home Loans, took third place with 6.38 pounds of bass. The biggest fish of the day included a 3.27-pound largemouth and a 2.11-pound smallmouth.

At this time of year, when we don blaze orange and stalk the ridge tops with rifles or shotguns, there are still big bass to hunt. With a lot of sportsmen in the field, this is a good time to be on the water.