Photos
Details
After reading about Toni’s recent kokanee adventures at American Lake I decided to give Lake Samish a try and see how the fall kokanee fishery is shaping up. I arrived at the ramp around 10:00 and the only other rig in the parking area was a bass boat trailer. Thinking to myself this is perfect, the salmon crowd was getting old and I get to fish in solitude. Anyway, boat in the water I head to the smaller lake and meter around a bit. In the fall I usually find fish stacked up off the creek mouths and nobody was home. As I worked my way away from the usual pre-spawn staging areas toward the center of the lake I started seeing large schools of fish on the meter. Good enough for me so I deployed the gear. One rigger running at 38’ and the other at 60’ I adjusted my trolling speed to 1.4 mph. Almost immediately the 60’ clip pops loose and a fish is making a major run. I fought it for a few minutes and the fish went one way while the hook went the other and no more fish. I reset the 60’ downrigger and kicked back listening to the Seahawks game. Nothing happened for the next ½ hour or so, so I decided to change my trolling speed to 1.2 mph. The change did the trick and both riggers went off at the same time but they were both drive-by fish.
After that I started cycling through different dodger/swing blade and lure combinations and experimenting with depth. At one point I was running an orange stripe swing blade followed by an orange Dick Night on the surface and wham-o it was fish on. I got it to the boat and it was a very red/green kokanee, cool looking but I released it unharmed. I put the same rig back in at 28 pulls and hooked up again almost instantly. It turned out to be another kokanee sporting its spawning colors so again it was released unharmed. In that the Dick Night was unscented I worked the school for an hour or so and released another 10 or 12 fish all very cool looking and in various stages of their spawning transformation.
I swapped back to bait behind conventional kokanee gear and started searching for a couple fish to take home for dinner (just a couple, our freezer is packed with salmon). A short while later I caught a nice 14” chromer on a dodger/mini squid set-up running at 38’. Figuring that I had another hour or so to fish and that I wanted to check out the main lake I packed up and moved to the other side of the bridge, set the gear and started trolling in the general direction of the ramp. Based on lessons learned while fishing the smaller lake I was running a dodger/mini squid on one side and a dodger/ spinner set up on the other. A short while later dinner was in the boat and I headed back towards the ramp.
I decided not to attach pictures of more dead fish and instead post a fall color scenery picture and an interesting catch (released) picture.
LESSONS LEARNED:
1) Lake Samish kokanee do not like cured shrimp.
2) A pink and chrome dodger followed by a green or pink mini squid was the hot ticket for table fish.
3) Trolling speed was very important with .08-1.2 mph being the ideal trolling speed.
4) Mature kokanee seem to love a orange Dick Night spoon.
5) Although various scented corn flavors worked, anise/krill was by far the better producer.
6) Lots of drive by hits, I should upgrade my kokanee gear hooks. Some are 2+ years old and well used.
View other reports
from rseas.
Comments
Why is this comment inappropriate?
Delete this comment? Provide reason.