It is Sunday morning, nice sunny skies and a plan to head south from Burlington and fish Lake Stevens. As we are heading south on I-5 it starts to sprinkle, by the time we are off the freeway in Marysville it’s raining and by the time we art at the top of the hill at highway 9 it is pouring. Deciding that we did not want to fish in the rain we decide to head north and fish Lake
Cavanaugh. On the way to Cavanaugh it sprinkles a little bit but there is also broken sun so we continue to the lake and launch the boat. Our first indicator of weather trouble was a brief blasting of frozen rain as we were running up the lake from the WDFW launch. Not a big deal and the sun came out shortly there after. Gear down we got a nice fat cutthroat almost immediately. It seemed like the start of a good day on the lake. Wrong, between the wind gusts, hail and snow that followed the weather was…less than favorable. After catching our five fish for dinner we made it a very short fishing trip.

We were running two rigs off the downriggers and three flat line rigs (We have two, two rod endorsements). We were pulling a variety of dodger or swing blades followed by custom tied spinners or spin-n-glow setups. We were also dragging a small Dick Night and a split shot on one of the flat lines. Aside from scent there was no pattern to the hardware that the fish wanted. Everything caught fish! After playing with a variety of scents we settled on Carp Spit and we had consistent action the entire hour we were on the lake. We had a number of hook-ups but only kept 5 chunky 12-14” cutthroat. We also lost one kokanee at the boat.

The water temperature varied between 38.6 and 39.4 degrees. We were metering fish but they were scattered with no concentrations at a given depth. Overall I would say the fishing was good but the weather was not, bring on summer! I decided to skip the fish pictures and instead share some of the weather related shots for your viewing pleasure.

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