The Northwest's Premier Outfitter offering guided fishing trips on Idaho's Clearwater and Snake Rivers, American Falls Reservoir, CJ Strike Reservoir, Salmon Falls Creek Reservoir, and the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon.
With the great forecast Idaho’s Clearwater River has this year we thought this would be a great time to share a video we did a few years back.
On the Clearwater we work as employees of Reel Time Fishing. This is a great river with huge Steelhead!
The team at Reel Time Fishing has openings! Get in touch with us and lets get your trip set up.
We had a great day today chasing salmon and Steelhead in the Heller Bar area of the Snake River. Although we mostly caught Fall Chinook today we did manage to find a few Steelhead. The river is absolutely loaded with fish now and should continue to fish fantastic for the next few weeks for salmon and Steelhead and well into February for Steelhead. This is a very active fishery where we mostly side drift bait, so you are actually responsible for catching your own fish. We have quite a few openings for this fishery, so get with us now to book your trip. To view our open dates click on the Book online now button. On our home page. We fish most of our fall snake River dates out of Heller Bar.
The past few weeks have seen us transition from our intense up at 2am, fishing at daylight spring Chinook routine to a much more laid back approach sturgeon fishing, bass fishing, and enjoying the beauty of the lower end of Hell’s Canyon. We have been having a blast catching fish ranging from 4-9 foot sturgeon and averaging 50 + bass/ day. The month of June is a time of year we look forward to every year, when we wind down a little and enjoy the river around us a little more. While we may start our days a little later and take in the scenery more often we are still fishing hard! The huge white Sturgeon of Hell’s Canyon will test your strength to the core. For those of you who have ever done battle with an 8 foot prehistoric giant of a fish you know what I am talking about! Many people walk away from our Sturgeon trips saying that it was one of the best times they have ever had fishing! We invite you to enjoy a day on the water with us and let us show you how special of a place we call home and what its flagship fish have to offer. For the rest of the month of June we are offering Catch and Release Sturgeon trips in Hell’s Canyon. Give us a call or check out the rest of our website for more information on these great trips. This is the perfect outing for family’s and people just looking to take in some sun and enjoy a relaxing day on the water.
The Snake River in the Clarkston area continued to fish well for us this past Sunday/ Monday opening. On Monday we had a group of four customers and had a great day catching Snake River Spring Chinook. We hooked a total of 7 fish and landed 4 of them, and when the tally came in at the end of the day we had close to 10-11 bites. This has been a great fishery this year and with the addition of a 2 fish limit the last two weeks we have been very happy.
Our success came while anchor fishing bait wrapped plugs such as the T-50 Flat Fish from Yakima Bait Company. I prefer this style of plug when I am fishing on anchor in places that require lead or divers to fish the bottom. My plug fishing set up this week consisted of a 6 foot 50# mono leader and a 4 foot dropper. All this is attached to 50# high visibility braided line such as Power Pro or TUFF Line. Our lead weights of choice were 4 oz cannon ball type sinkers. We have been having the most success wrapping our plugs with our own tuna concoctions, and the recipe for our success can be found in a previous blog.
In addition to catching fish on plugs, we also had some good action fishing herring and a flasher on anchor. Our method for this is similar to the way we fish plugs, but with a few minor changes. Our most successful system was the same mainline and dropper length for our plug set up, but we add a 24 inch bumper between our mainline and flasher. Our most successful flasher was a Green and Chrome Leo flasher. I think this flasher was a major reason for our success as the flows this week were almost too slow to spin a herring, but with the slow roll of the Leo flasher we were able to impart that great herring action on our baits. To get your own supply of Leo Flashers make sure you head over to Moneymakerfishing.com and check out their supply!
Hopefully we get one more Snake River opening, as I think the fishing will be similar to this past week. We should know for sure if we are going to be able to fish by the end of the day Thursday. I do have openings this weekend for both Snake River Spring Chinook ( if we get to fish) and Snake River Sturgeon / Bass Fishing. This time of year yields the best sturgeon fishing of the year and is a great way to spend a day at the entrance to Hell’s Canyon. Also if anyone is interested in keeper sturgeon fishing we offer trips on the Hanford Reach section of the Columbia River. Catch rates here are high and we often land 10-20 fish per day and average about a keeper per boat.
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We snuck out yesterday for an early Sturgeon fishing trip on the Snake River out of Heller Bar. With our steelhead season behind us we have been switched over to targeting catch and release sturgeon. The weather was a little unsettled, but the fish were cooperative. We landed a small 3 foot fish and one monster 8 footer. We also had a few other bites, but considering we only fished for a few hours I think we did fantastic.
Our bait of choice is salmon bellies and scraps from salmon season. We find this to be the most consistent bait, but we often fish other baits such as squid, roll mop herring, worms, or any fresh cut bait we can get our hands on.
Catch and release sturgeon fishing will be great from now through the end of June. On our sturgeon trips we average multiple fish landed per day with the fish ranging from 3-11 feet in length. We also offer sturgeon trips with the possiblity of keepers on the Hanford reach during this same time frame. These trips are a great experience that all should see. The power of these large sturgeon is amazing. 
The Snake River out of Heller Bar continues to fish well. Yesterday we had a great day on the river with only 2 customers going 6-10 on Steelhead and also landing a 3 foot sturgeon on steelhead gear.
We found most of our fish just upstream from Heller Bar as the Grand Ronde is flowing very high and muddy, and has made the Snake River downstream from the Grand Ronde muddy and not fishable.
We had almost all our bites drifting my Jones Sport Fishing shrimp cure in the bright red color in combination with a chartreuse cheater or corkie.
I am not really sure how much longer we can expect good fishing in this area, but I’m expecting it to fish well through at least this next weekend, we might se good fishing later on, but water conditions will dictate that. After that we often have great success switching over to catch and release trophy sturgeon fishing.
