July 26th, 2012: This season has probably been the best season for fishing that I have seen in over 20 years of being here on Bolton Lake! There hasn’t been a day without a trophy and there have been so many days with 6, 8 and even 12 trophies! Almost every group has commented on how great the fishing has been this year, the best most of them have ever seen as well! The weather has been more comfortable over the past 10 days, just in the 70’s and 80’s and cooling off nicely over night. It’s a bit smoky when the wind blows from the wrong direction as we have a fire burning 10 miles to the West of us and another fire 20 miles to the East. There hasn’t been too much wind this season, just a couple of days where it was extra rough but my guides are experts at handling the boats in the rough water. It’s a beautiful day today, just a slight breeze from the North and the skies are clear, should be a high of about 70 degrees.
Our mid/late season projects have started, we are pressure washing the cabins and will re-stain them soon. It took me 10 hours to do one wall of the main lodge, the front and back will be more challenging with the higher peaks. I have added 12 loads of gravel to the runway and plan to do 12 more. I knock the rocks off to the edge of the runway with the Grader after I’ve dumped the gravel and we plan to pick up all the rocks and use them for part of our break water. This is going to be a huge job, but it’s time to buy new boats and we need to protect the investment better. The cribs from the old dock are still in the water by our floating dock so we just need to add more rocks to the tops of those cribs and fill in the gaps in between. If the equipment doesn’t break down, we’ll have a rock wall of sorts in the water in front of our dock which will protect the boats when the nasty northwest wind blows. With the cost of the new boats for next season, unfortunately there will be a price increase for our lodge guests. We hope to keep the rates the same at the outposts, but we need to build a new cabin at Aswap soon so we might increase the rate there to pay for a new cabin.
Another big project that will be completed this year is removing the old walk way and replacing it with a new gravel path. The old boards are breaking too easily now and the logs underneath are rotten. We believe it will be safer and easier to maintain the gravel path over the old wooden one. We are also working to level a couple of cabins that have sunk into the clay a bit. We’re going to cut some new posts to help keep the cabins from sinking again once we get them re-leveled.
Here a some more pictures taken over the past 2-3 weeks:
