Saturday at Swift Reservoir most likely was closing day of the 2013 fishing season for me. I might try pulling Wiggle Warts for coho at Lady Island, or for steelhead at the mouth of Oregon’s John Day River, although I doubt it. (It’s time now to walk through southeast Washington under the pretense of pheasant hunting.)
October is fun time to fish at Swift. There’s perhaps a dozen boats, at the most, on a 4,500-acre reservoir. It used to just be a trout fishery, but now there are lots of “resident” coho and chinook that apparently did not find their way to the fish collector at the dam.
It took a bit of experimenting, but we found the most bites came using a half-ounce sinker with 45 to 50 pulls of line off the reel. Wobbling lures like an Apex or Wiggle Hoochie outperformed spinners, except for a Smile Blade spinner.
The trout are 12 to 14 inches, while the coho are about 9 inches and the little chinook about 10 inches, so not too big at all. To select for trout, we found tipping the lure with pieces of worm made a big difference.
The reservoir is only seven feet below full pool, so launching is not a problem.
