In a recent column I answered questions about how I disseminate information. A few readers felt that my fishing reports weren't accurate based on their own experiences. A friend suggested that I write a follow-up column so people might understand that even professionals have rough days on the water.

Last Thursday, my older brother Dave Allphin and Steve Richman joined me for a one-day trip to the Gorge hoping to duplicate the great time my family and I had just a week prior. The day was perfect; birds sang, the water was calm, and we instantly found fish on the finder. Then, within a couple of minutes we got two or three quick hits on our tube jig. But, we struggled to hook the fish..

I did catch one fish in the first 30 minutes, a 7-pounder that came willingly to the boat without much of a fight. But then, just as if a faucet had been turned off, the bites stopped. We tried using different colors, different sizes of baits, or different lures - all to no avail. We changed locations, found more fish and dangled our baits right in front of their faces yet they wouldn't bite.

For hours we tried to figure them out. Were they just mouthing the baits? Were they not hungry? Did our baits smell wrong? Did we smell wrong? We explored each of these questions and many, many more. By 11:00 A.M. we still hadn't come up with an answer, but my brother Dave finally hooked a lake trout. Though it wasn't a monster, it did tell us the story of the day. The fish I caught in the early morning was hooked in the tip of the upper mouth - and so was the one my brother caught. This proved at least in my mind, that the fish weren't serious about eating anything. They were playing with their food.

After giving up on lake trout, we slipped over to one of my favorite bass haunts and boated a dozen of so smallmouth bass before returning home. But, this experience echoed the point of my previous column. We believed the fish would still be there (which they were), and that we could entice them to bite (which we could not). The lake trout won the match for that day, and though it was a fantastic day to be on the water, our ice chest remained, for the most part, empty.

"This has been the most fun I've had this summer," said Richman. "I didn't catch a lake trout but I sure enjoyed the day!" And, isn't that what fishing's all about?