Late start again but we made up for it. We launched in Lake Stevens at around 10:00-10:30 and started out fishing the 70’ line just outside of North Cove. It was a very slow pick on smaller kokanee until we did a bathroom stop at around 1:00. Feeling better and back out in front of North Cove we set out the gear. First fish was on before I got all the rods back in the water. That’s when things got crazy and the next two hours was non-stop kokanee induced pandemonium!

We were running 4 rods, two flat lined at 25 pulls and two on the downriggers. I didn’t count but I would say that more fish were caught on the downriggers than on the flat line rigs. We were running both riggers at 6’ with the business end of things 15 pulls behind the downrigger clips. All four rods were rigged with a dodger and green custom tied spinner (lessons learned from yesterday). All four setups were tipped with shoepeg corn marinated in either carp-spit oil or anise/krill oil.

The water temperature varied between 48.9 degrees and 51.2 degrees. The magic trolling speed today was exactly 1.4 mph (GPS). As with the last few outings there were not many fish jumping but there were large numbers of fish in the lower half of the thermocline and just below it. We couldn’t get the deeper fish to show any interest in our offerings. I can’t say the same for our shallower efforts. Fishing the top few feet of the water column, in two hours we caught a majority of our 20 fish limit. Our limit included kokanee to almost 15” and over a pound. We had numerous doubles and triples to keep us hopping. At one point we had three fresh fish in the same net. Between the weather and the hot bite it was a great afternoon on the water.

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