Amber Lake - May 16

About a month ago, my brother called to ask if I wanted to join him for a trip to Central Ferry on the Snake River in the south east corner of the state. I said sure but wasn’t quite sure what we were going to do. His son, my nephew, had a conclave going on there so we were only needed to provide transportation and dinner for a couple of nights. We had Saturday free so we decide to check out Amber Lake. Amber is a selective fishery near Cheney. A nice little lake, stocked with rainbows, cutts and brown trout.

As we were setting up, Mike walked over to some rock rip-rap to find a rock to use as an anchor. As he was turning over potential anchors he said he had the thought, “this would probably be a great place if I were a rattle snake”. Sure enough, three feet away was large rattler coiled under a rock. The snake never buzzed and Mike sensibly offered to relocate his search to another pile.

The day was beautiful, chamber of commerce blue sky and temps in the 80’s. The lake fished well and provided lots of different habitat opportunities from deep cool water to shallow flats with lots of weed cover and shore structure. The lake produced consistently and offered a number of very active and strong fish in the 14” – 17” range. I did have one fish that shook me off after offering me a view of a tail and dorsal fin that suggested it could have been a much larger fish, but oh well; the ones that get away are always hard to measure.