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Another trip to Baker and after some scratching around, a few more sockeye in the net. My son and I headed up to Baker Lake Wednesday evening for fishing on Thursday. We fished for a bit Wednesday evening, less to catch fish than meter around and map out my plan for the morning. Plan in place we head for a calm area to set the hook for the evening. After dinner and an intense game of checkers we set the alarm and turn off the lights. Ahead of the alarm I wake up at 3:00 and see that my son is shivering so I get up, give him my blanket and get the boat ready to go. Anchor stowed, I run to an area where I was metering a lot of fish the night before and my screen lit up with sockeye.
At about 4:15 I figured there was enough light to get the show on the road and it was gear down. I was running 4 rods, 2 off the down-riggers and 2 with 3 ounces of lead. I started with the down-riggers running at 12’ and 18’ and the other rods at 16 pulls and 21 pulls. Almost immediately one of the surface rods goes off and a little while later the first fish of the day is in the net. Thinking this is good, we’re going to make a short day of it and would catch breakfast and COFFEE on the way home… We were running “0” 50/50 dodgers or a chrome dodger I had doctored up with gold prism tape followed by a variety of pointy offerings tipped with cured shrimp. For the next few hours we had slow but constant action but had trouble getting a fish in the net. We lost a few fish in mid-fight and lost a few at the net. At some point I started switching gear with the hopes of improving the slow but constant status.
We went through a number of setups, including a few versions of rigs with smiley blades when I stumbled on the days go to rig. It turned out that a single 1/0 red hook or one of my sockeye flies with out smiley blades on a 7” leader was the ticket. Once we had it dialed in the action went from “slow but constant” to on fire and we had our limits onboard in short order. I know crazy, but the trolling speed was critical yesterday. We would only get bit if we were doing exactly 1.1 on our GPS/fish finder. Ever though we saw deeper meter marks, all of our fish hit at 18-28’.
We had a great trip and the father/son time was thoroughly enjoyed. While on the water we talked to our fearless leader (WL Mike) and his wife. They have a nice setup and it sounded as though they had had a successful trip.
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