This trip really should be listed as a 3+ or 4- but I guess it wasn't that great in the scheme of things. We were on the lake shortly after 4:00am, one other boat on the water. We decided to forgo using my 19ft bayliner due to its non-inspection ready status (just in case...really don't want a ticket), and threw my brother in law's 12ft Valco in the back of my truck and hauled it down the old fashioned way.

There was a ton of surface action, mostly fry from what I could tell, and the lake was mostly glass smooth. We set the downriggers for 25-35 ft and were off and running. The fish finder was lit up like a Christmas tree as we trolled along the eastern shore, but the un-baited and un-scented tackle we were using didn't garner any excitement. After one pass we baited up the gear and that must have been the ticket. I scored my first and only Koke shortly after baiting up (thinking to myself at the time, Hey, I'm going to do pretty good today! wrong), and my buddy caught three in a row shortly thereafter. All fish were caught around the 30-40 ft range. I had a leaded line running as well switching up occasionally but that only netted me two peamouth chub.

There were lots of nibbles and bites. All three that my buddy caught, he had to release off the downrigger himself, defective quick release maybe? I lost a couple bites and my buddy lost two that he had on the line for sure. One was about 6 feet from the boat when the hook broke loose.

I caught my one on my new teardrop shaped dodger with UV stickers on it and a little eye, and yellow spinner type lure, with shoepeg corn and krill oil. I switched up gear consistently after that but no takers. My buddy caught all three of his on a silver dodger with green and pink spots and a red wedding ring with a glow in the dark hook, which was coated in corn oil. He managed to lose said setup mysteriously. We were in 80 feet of water, and he had his gear at about 40 feet. His line broke loose and nothing came up but empty line. I looked at the depth finder and there was nothing to be seen to explain what happened. The line was definitely cut and did not come loose. Loch Samish Monster maybe? Who knows.

The bite seemed to stop just around 7am which is when the wind picked up. That little boat gets tossed around pretty good in even a little bit of wind. Our primary battery gave out on us and the secondary made me nervous so we called it quits around 10:00. All in all a good trip, but still looking for my first "limit out" of the season.