I finally got up to Banks Lake. I have had some great reports on the walleye fishing, and I am a big fan of fishing for smallmouth bass on the big impoundment. The fishing day began in Devils Punchbowl. I have had good luck in here in the past at this time of year, but not on Thursday. I marked a few fish but didn’t get a single bite. So, I headed out and around the corner to the sand flats at the bottom end of Steamboat Rock. There were fish here and I got five bites and landed on nice walleye. The bites came on a Rick Graybill special spinner, which features a Colorado blade and blue and pink beads, and my favorite Dutch Fork Lures Blue Tiger Turtle Back spinner. The action wasn’t fast enough so I ran over to Barker Flats and trolled a couple of paths, one at each end of the flats. I was marking some fish, but they weren’t interested in my baits. By then I just wanted to catch some fish and ran over the broken basalt rock and shale slide shore. I got a bunch on a watermelon lizard.
Banks Lake smallmouth will always whack a watermelon lizard!