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Underwater Spinner Bites: Salmon

May 3, 2020 By JD Leave a Comment

Here’s some fun footage of salmon chasing down and eating my spinners. See if you can identify chinook, coho, sockeye, chum and pink in here…

Filed Under: Underwater Photos/Video Tagged With: Salmon, salmon fishing, underwater, underwater video

The Greatest Job in the World: River Restoration

April 26, 2020 By JD 14 Comments

Guess I’m still playing with Tonka Trucks these days…just on a little bigger scale!
It’s not every day you get to custom build salmon spawning habitat!

Back in 2007, I was blessed with having the world’s greatest job…I was hired as a consultant to a spawning bed restoration project on the Stanislaus River in California.

My responsibilities: Direct two front loaders on where to dump gravel and boulders. Not only was the pay outstanding, but taking a thrashed river and making it pristine for Chinook and trout was awfully good for the soul! And, let’s be honest here, driving those big tractors around was pretty fun too!

We started the project carefully sifting and washing 200 tons of perfect spawning cobble and then added a couple hundred boulders in 1- to 7-ton range…

Then we went to work…


Here’s a look at what a lot of the river looked like before we started…

And, from a slightly different angle, when we were done…

Check out how dismal this side channel looked before…

Here’s how she looked after the work…

Before…

After…

Again, much of this stretch of river was sluggish and silted in before the work began…not exactly pristine habitat…

What a world of difference, eh?

When it was all said & done, we added 33 new riffles to a short 2-mile stretch of river…

On the last day, Dennis Hood of KDH Environmental and I toured the site & admired our handiwork…

Apparently, the salmon like their new home…

Filed Under: River Restoration Projects Tagged With: gravel restoration, restoration, salmon spawning, spawning gravel, stanislaus river

The Resurrection: Will my 30-year-old jon boat ever fish again?

April 23, 2020 By JD Leave a Comment

After getting abused in its early days and neglected more recently, will I be able to get my 30-year-old jon boat back up and running to catch fish?

Filed Under: Fishing Stories Tagged With: catfish, fishing, fishing boat, fixer upper, jon boat, jon boat restoration, trolling

Micro Boat Trolling Adventure!

April 19, 2020 By JD Leave a Comment

I got out early this morning on Lake Tahoe with my mini 10′ jon boat (equipped with a flame throwing 2.5 hp motor) for a little trolling action. When I decided to put two lines out, things got interesting in a hurry!

Gear used in this mission:

MegaBass Vision 110 in the Table Rock SP color

Lucky Craft Pointer 78 in Rainbow Trout

Lucky Craft Pointer 78 in Aurora Green Perch

Filed Under: Pure Entertainment Tagged With: brown trout, double header, double hookup, jon boat, lake tahoe, trolling, trout trolling

FishWithJD TV Episode 2: Scott “The Sporting Chef” Leysath

April 4, 2020 By JD Leave a Comment

If you missed it live, you can catch Episode 2 of FishWithJD TV right here. This time around, I welcomed the country’s foremost wild game chef to the program, Scott Leysath, host of the popular TV shows The Sporting Chef and Dead Meat, which can be seen on the sportsman Channel.

Scott has been a lot of “quarantine cooking” lately and shares with us all sorts of cool ways to prepare fish chowder, ducks and geese, gravlax, squirrel and more!

Watch Episode 1 HERE with award-winning rod designer, Fred Contaoi of Douglas Outdoors.

Filed Under: Cooking, FishWithJD TV Tagged With: cooking fish, cooking game, dead meat, dead meat tv, fishing, how to make gravlax, hunting, scott leysath, the sporting chef

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