Gary Lewis / For The BulletinDave Jones got an early start on the trout fishing at Diamond Lake, wind-drifting for rainbows on a Friday in late March.

We stopped at Diamond Lake on Friday. High in the Cascades, it often takes a four-wheel drive to power off the highway into the parking lot in March. Not this year.

Most years, the ice doesn’t come off the lake until the end of April and even into May.

It felt like June on Diamond.

Greg Gulbrandsen, Dave Jones and I brought spinning rods. We planned to fish a bit from the bank, but I spied Scott Lunski in the marina store, and he offered us a boat ride. We were underway in 20 minutes.

Instead of ice fishing shacks and anglers huddled around ragged holes with little tip-up rods, there were about a dozen boats on the lake.

The depth finder showed a water temperature of 44 degrees, a bit cold for rainbows, but not too cold.

We drifted with the wind and let our baits run through 15 feet of water, trying to keep out of the weeds. We had a couple of bites on the first pass and a hookup on the second pass, and then we motored across the lake to the western shore.

Lunski, who owns Detroit Lake Marina, was at Diamond Lake with his brother-in-law, Dave West, to sample the trout fishing before the season kickoff on his home water.

Don’t hold off buying that fishing license this year. Even though the traditional trout opener is April 25, there are a number of waters that are open year-round, and they are already kicking out limits of rainbows.

Because this looks like a year we’re going to be low on water, it makes sense to start early. Some good bets for rainbows are Diamond Lake, Detroit Lake, Haystack Reservoir and Lake Simtustus. Each one can be fished as well from the bank as from a boat.

Try to time trips for a good bite. Optimum conditions for fast fishing include a rising barometer and incremental increases in the water temperature.

On Diamond Lake, we fished until a bit after noon. Lunski stood in the bow and cast a Shasta Tackle HD UV Silver Tiger spoon tipped with a bit of worm. A trout slammed the lure and cleared the water several times before Lunski swung it into the boat.

The bite is on at Diamond, and it will only be getting better as the water warms. Take a thermometer and check the temperature from time to time. Expect the bite to improve with each one-degree bump in temperature.

Any day with a bit of cloud cover can improve an angler’s chances earlier in the season. And if there is a bit of a wind chop, even better.

Detroit Lake is due for visits from the stocking trucks in the second week of April, and that will add to last year’s holdovers.

Lunski says he sees the new hatchery fish close to the surface. The holdovers stack deeper in the water column, and the biggest fish of all, the big rainbows and the landlocked chinook salmon, run deepest.

For faster limits, target planted trout with small rainbow-pattern Rapalas or frog-pattern fly-rod Flatfish. Bank anglers will do better with dough baits, salmon eggs or nightcrawlers.

Haystack Reservoir, located between Terrebonne and Madras, is a good early-season fishery, and the reports have been good, both for rainbows and bass that have an early start on the growing season. Expect the fishing to improve with hatchery supplementation in mid-April.

The fishing at Simtustus usually lags behind other lakes and reservoirs because it takes longer to warm that deep and narrow channel. But the water is already warming there. Plan for the third week of April. There are good bank angling spots in various places on the reservoir, and it is also good for anglers with trolling gear.

With the good fishing weather we’ve enjoyed this year, I’ve put in a few hours on several different days and had two days in a row where I caught no fish. I call that research, but it all paid off early this week with a trip to another little lake that would usually be iced in at this time of year. It wasn’t, and the fish and bugs were active in the warming water.

This is one of those years where the procrastinator is going to miss out on the best fishing. The bite is on.

— Gary Lewis is the host of “Frontier Unlimited TV” and author of “John Nosler — Going Ballistic,” “A Bear Hunter’s Guide to the Universe,” “Hunting Oregon” and other titles. Contact Lewis at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.