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Had an opportunity to chase some American Lake kokanee with my brother Jim over the weekend, and we connected!
We launched about 5:30 and the sky had a heavy overcast and looked like rain. I started out with a tandem sling blade setup trailing a green "St. Maries Special" (essentially a green wedding ring) with a Gulp maggot on each hook. I rigged this on one of my Lake Roosevelt leaded line trolling outfits and ran it out 70'. My brother tied on a pink version of a wedding ring and a single sling blade and dropped that down off his mini downrigger at 11', but I don't remember how far back he was behind the ball.
We were only trolling 5 - 10 minutes when a kokanee hit my line, and soon the first fish was in the boat. Jim quickly followed with another nice one, and the bite was on. It wasn't fast and furious, but it was consistent for about 2 hours, then the bite was off and we had to work to find some action.
We changed things around, location, depths, trolled offerings, flasher setups, etc., and finally called it about 11:30 with 7 kokanee between us. Not a bad way to spend a chilly Saturday morning! :-)
Water surface temp was 61.5°, and warmed up to 62.5° by late morning. I think we trolled at .8 - .9mph most of the time, but did vary that to 1.2mph or so once the bite went off. I brought my new FishHawk TD to see what it would tell us, and it showed water temp to be 61.5° down to 15' then started dropping and was 54° at 30'. I think this will be really handy for targeting kokanee at Roosevelt during warm weather. :-)