Just got back from the second annual Baker Lake camping/fishing trip with the family, staying three nights at Swift Creek campground and fishing three mornings on the lake. The fishing was slow, but I did manage to scratch out two sockeye and one kokanee in three days of fishing. The first day I got up early with my son and got skunked. We were mostly fishing two rods, but had three out for a while (before we got our gear tangled up and I decided two rods was plenty). The second day I caught two sockeye and a kokanee. The first sockeye came at 41' on the downrigger near the north bank (just west of Shannon Creek) on a pink UV hoochie with shaker wings. The second came at 36' on the downrigger in the middle between the Shannon Creek side and Noisy Creek side on a tiny pink mini squid hoochie with a pink smile blade. The kokanee came on a similar shaker wing/hoochie rig. The third day my daughter got up early and fished with me. We got skunked, but we did have a sockeye on momentarily out in the middle of the lake. It was the strangest thing. I say the rod making some odd dipping movements, pulled it out of the clip, and reeled in, but didn't really feel a fish pulling (it felt more like the gear was tangled on itself). Then my gear was about 15 or 20 feet from the boat I saw a sockeye, but it immediately turned and swam away. I can't say for sure whether it was hooked and got off or if it was just following my gear and nipping at it until it saw the boat. Anyway, the rest of the day I saw a bunch of fish following my gear on the sonar, and I tried everything I could to get them to bite, but no luck.

I was using a variety of live sand shrimp, Ray's cured coon stripe shrimp, and grocery store shrimp cured in Fire Cure and a variety of scents. I know at least one of the sockeye bit a rig with sand shrimp, and I think the other came on Fire Cured shrimp with crayfish scent, but I'm not certain.

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