MotorBoat (of washingtonlakes.com), my son and I fished the sockeye opener on Baker Lake today. The day started slow but we finished with a bang and limited the boat. Our day started with a sizable dolly that was left in the water for pictures and release. Shortly there after my son is fighting a very feisty sockeye, the fish was stripping line and jumping with each renewed attempt to escape. We’re all looking at each other and commenting this is no Lake Washington sockeye. Shortly after the fish posed for some pictures and was safely tucked away in the kill bag when Dave the local game warden came to visit and check our licenses. After determining that all was in order we got to talking and he indicated that my son’s fish was the first ever sport caught sockeye in Baker Lake as we know it today. Quite an accomplishment and he is stoked. For the next two hours it was kind of slow but after a move up to the Noisy Creek area we got back in to the fish and were consistently catching fish and had multiple doubles to keep things exciting.

We were fishing a spread of gear that included a single red 3/0 hook dodger combo, a single red 3/0 hook with hot pink mini squid dodger combo and single red 3/0 hook with pink smiley blade dodger combo all tipped with shrimp. We started with the downrigger chasing meter marks (short lived plan, we snagged and lost the downrigger ball) and 5 ounce mooching sinkers/dodger lure combos. The mooching rig combos were ran at 35-40 pulls with a trolling speed of 0.9-1.8 MPH. We caught fish on everything, but the smiley blade combo defiantly had an edge over the other gear. Final count; 6 sockeye to 7 ½ pounds, 1 dolly released unharmed, 1 released sockeye and a few lost fish or missed hits.

We had a great day on the water and my son and I enjoyed MotorBoat’s the company.

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