I bought a new truck a few weeks ago and I’ve been dying to take a fishing road trip. We looked at the weather window for fishing Rock Lake (near Spokane). Sunday and Monday looked to be our best days for fishing before the storm front rolled in.
We left early Sunday morning and got a half a day of fishing in on Sunday and a full day on Monday. Day 1 we got on the water at noon. The lake was windy, cold and choppy. Having made the 5 hour drive, there was no question – we were fishing! We paddled down the lake about 3 miles trolling a variety of different Rapalas and Shad Raps. We had great success landing several brown trout in the 15 to 19″ range.
We grabbed a hotel in Cheney (the closest town – at 40 minutes away) and would get an earlier start on Monday. The lake was calm and glass like. The sun was shining and it was looking to be a good fishing day. About an hour into our paddle and struggling to land a couple fish, we watched as heavy fog pushed over the lake and would stay there the remainder of the day. We paddled about 3 miles down and crossed the lake to make our way back. We caught a few, but no trophies we had hoped to encounter. Still a fun trip nonetheless.
Rock Lake is in the middle of nowhere. It’s been a lake I’ve always wanted to fish because of the trophy brown trout that few anglers catch every year.
The lake is roughly 7 miles long and a mile wide. It’s over 300 feet deep in some places with volcanic rock spears that come up from the bottom in random places around the lake. This is NOT the lake you want to get in trouble on. There’s one end of the lake to launch a boat or kayak and really no place to safely pull ashore should you have watercraft problems. It was important for us to keep an eye on the weather while we were out there. It holds many brown trout, rainbow trout and largemouth bass. I encourage you to pick up a copy of this month’s Northwest Sportsman Magazine . My buddy, Jeff Holmes, wrote a great article on this lake.
