Macks & bears and fires, oh my!

Well, with river salmon fishing not looking real promising these days, I headed back up to Lake Tahoe to chase mackinaw again.

I got back up to the West Shore on Tuesday evening to find a little bit of a disaster at the house (more on that later).

Up early the next morning, we hit the lake and found lots and lots of macks on the graph but the bite was so-so. We still landed probably 10+ fish and got limits but we really had to work for them for some reason. Part of the deal was that my net blew out of the boat on the way up, so we lost three nice keeper fish right at the boat. Like the old saying goes…it’s always something, right?

Anyway, here’s Jackie from Auburn, CA showing off a typical laker that we caught on 2-ounce spoons jigged in 89 to 135 feet of water.

There are so many fish in the areas that I’ve been working that it’s sick and when they start chewing aggressively again, we’ll be back to the easy limits by 7 am program.

But the fishing is only part of the story…

When I got to the house on Tuesday night, I found a long trail of trash on the front porch, streaming out of a gaping hole in the front door.

The bears had paid us a little visit once again (the third break-in this year at our place).

While the door was the only major damage, the critters made a huge mess as they went through all the kitchen (fridge, cupboards, pantry, spice rack, etc.), sampling everything as they went.

Apparently, they’re huge fans of maple syrup….check out those teeth marks!

But they were also big fans of ranch dressing, instant oatmeal, butter, Hansen’s soda, Diet Pepsi and ice cream.

What they didn’t seem to like:

pickles

soy sauce

yellow mustard

beer (huh??)

corn starch

Wolfgang Puck chicken noodle soup

and…

Italian salad dressing, though they seemed to enjoy tracking it all over the house:

On top of it all, we had two more fires this week — one on the north shore that’s now contained and then another started up on Wednesday near Donner Summit.

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