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My crew saturday and Sunday consisted of three gentlemen who were all employees of a certain boat company up in Collville Washington. I learned a lot about boats and hull design and really would have liked to learn more, but it was kind of hard to carry on a long conversation with all the action we were getting.
The surface water temps are perfect right now and these fish are super aggressive. I feel the Kokanee population is only a quarter of what it was last year. This makes finding them a bit tricky. Once we found fish we got a ton of hookups but only managed to land 60% of these. It's frustrating to loose so many fish, but I've learned to laugh it off and enjoy the sport even when it's frustrating.
Beautiful was an understatement for yesterday's weather. Clear skies and flat seas usually causes fish to seek deeper water, but that is not the case yet. We did mark deeper fish but we could not get them to bite, so we focused on the bitters at 5-15'. For those of you not using planer boards I would suggest using Mack's DD Dodgers. Especially when fishing shallow. When adjusted appropriately these dodger will "walk" their way away from the boat laterally. This will give you a wider spread and in turn help to separate lines. Very cool feature. We caught fish on apex, hoochies, coho killers, wedding rings, plugs, and flies. After much experimenting the fish made it clear they wanted flies the most. Especially orange ones. This gave me a chance to bust out my Arctic Fox trolling tube flies and test them and the action disc against my custom flies. I feel the tube fly has a huge advantage over traditional flies. It allows you to determine the best hook configuration. It was obvious this weekend that we lost fewer fish on the tube flies running two single #2 hooks. Keith's trophy 4.25# 23" Kokanee was fooled by an orange Arctic Fox Tube Fly fished with a #2 WiggleFin Action Disc and no dodger. Looks like I'm going to need to bolster my supply of tube flies and action discs.
Last season I trolled 1.7 mph religiously. This weekend I varied my speed from 1.7-2.5mph. If this keeps up I think I may have to purchase an ITroll throttle control unit from Downriggeral. Sounds like hunt mode would be perfect for this application.
Well, we had a stellar weekend. I even got to land a few fish. The Kokanee are getting fatter, but the bows seem to be getting leaner IMO. Anybody else noticing thin rainbows? Maybe we just caught the starving ones that were desperate for a meal. I may need to slow down to get the fat lazy ones.
I have several opening for this fishery. I would love to have you and your crew on the boat and share with you what I know about this fishery. I promise you will learn something and quite possibly catch the biggest Kokanee of your life.
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