After a lengthy hiatus we made it out in the boat yesterday. Arriving at Lake Cavanaugh around 10:30 we had a couple off the trailer maintenance items to take care of so we didn’t start fishing until 11 or 11:30. Once underway we headed for the point about midway down the north shore. On arrival we found a significant amount of floating storm debris and weeds. There were a few meter marks in the top 15’ of water so we set up on the outside of the debris field in 70’ of water. From there we worked our way towards the islands and then to the south shore of the lake where we started metering significant numbers of fish. The surface temperature varied between 37.1 and 37.6 degrees with a defined thermocline running at 15’ to about 35’. A majority of the meter marks were showing just above the thermocline or in the lower 5’ of the thermocline or at 30-35’

We were fishing 4 rods, two on downriggers and two lead line setups. At the business end we were running an attractor of some sort, either a dodger, flasher or a large spoon converted to a dodger followed by various lures tied up the night before. The lures were mini squids, wedding band type spinners or wooly buggers. We had action on everything presented but the spoon type attractor and wooly bugger was hot ticket for the day. Our fishing depth ranged from 18’-44’ on the downriggers to ½-1 color on the lead line. We were running 60-100’ behind the downriggers and the lead line rigs had 30’ of 8# fluorocarbon between end of the lead line and the attractor. We started trolling at 1.2 mph but the action didn’t pickup until we kicked our trolling speed up to 1.7 mph. We were trolling an “S” pattern and most of the Bites were on the outside rod during a turn. Observation made, I tried kicking the trolling speed up further but the increased speed would shut down the bite. My conclusion is that the change in lure speed during a turn is what triggered the fish to bite.

We fished until 1:00 or so and the final tally was 5 cutthroat to about 15” with others left swimming. One of the fish had sea-lice on it suggesting that it recently made its way from the bay into the lake. I did meter some schools of kokanee but with the cooler water they didn’t want to come out and play.

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