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So after reading all the reports from Baker Lake, watching the video from Mike and seeing success, my father and I headed up to the lake for a camping sockeye extravaganza! Boy we had an adventure.
We don't have a big boat, but we have a kayak that my grandad built in the 30's. The drive up was gorgeous. We arrived around 4 pm on Friday, and finding a campsite was the first priority. Originally we had planned to setup my raft and tow our gear across the lake to camp over by noisy creek. But when we got to the top of the lake, looking with the binoculars the entire shoreline was populated with campers, and the water was pretty choppy which would have made for a rough paddle. Also, we didn't want to have to pay 8 dollars a night to park at the boat launch at swift creek campground, because we could launch our kayak anywhere really. There were a bunch of folks camping at primitive sites all along Baker Lake Rd. so when we finally found a suitable launching spot, we decided to scrap the far side of the lake idea and camped at the mouth of the creek just south of Shannon Creek campground. IT was a nice spot with a little waterfall and a sheltered area with a large culvert headed under the road which turned out to be the perfect way to launch our kayak without having to carry the thing down a steep embankment.
So we set up camp and pitched the tents, let the weasels run around for a while. Yea, we brought our pet weasels this trip, Nicci Fattums is our old weasel and needs heart medicine every day so she has to come along on every trip we take. Winston is the other weasel who is dumb as a stick and mischievous as heck stealing shoes and digging holes left and right. He's also afraid of the boat, so Nicci Fattums is the only one who goes out in the boat with us.
So I have never trolled for salmon and have limited experience, albeit with a high level of success, trolling for kokanee. After reading the reports online the excitement was contagious and I had decided that if guys with big boats and downriggers could get fish left and right than with a bit of work I could have moderate success. So I did the research and invested in the tackle from past baker lake reports. We used size 1 and 0 flashers and dodgers, double red hooks tipped with bait, a wedding ring style helicopter blade and other stuff. I fashioned a DIY down rigger from a large fishing pole with 100 pound test power pro that I use for throwing big weights from shore for sturgeon. I used the short half of the pole, marked a 1 foot measure on the rod with masking tape. On the end I had a two pound ball with a downrigger clip attached. I propped it up in my kayak with a clip on rod holder, we didn't want to drill or install anything into the frame of our kayak as it is an antique and we wanted to keep it in it's original condition the way my grandad made it. On the other rod we used a pink lady diver with a flasher hooks bait setup. I had my new to me fishfinder (thanks a million Quad!) setup with a portable suction cup mount on the bottom of the kayak set up and ready to sound the alarm when the fish were beneath us.
The first night we went out to test my homemade setup and the weather was quite nice. As we were leaving the shore to launch, my father wanted to get a picture of the beautiful Mount Baker with the bright sun illuminating it as I paddled away from our campground. We had put our portable electronic in a watertight pouch to save them from wayward splashes and chop in the event that, as often happens in small craft, water somehow made it over the side and into the cockpit.
Now I have alway, since an unfortunate incident about 7 years ago involving an ex girlfriend and a boat and lost keys, left my keys on shore. I have lost them once before, and ever since I leave them on shore in a hideaway, or at camp, and alway ALWAYS have a spare in my wallet. My father had never learned this lesson. He did this weekend. His new car is a Chevy Aveo with a smart key, the kind with the buttons and keyless entry on it. A spare key from the dealer was pushing $400.00 so he opted out of that ripoff. But he had put the keys in the water tight pouch with his cellphone and camera and fishing license because they are electronic and shouldn't get wet. As the keys were sitting on top of the camera, he tugged on the camera's lanyard and as if by some sort of demonic magic, the keys flew out of the bag and dropped right over the edge into 160 feet of deep green water. We just paused and looked at eachother.
"You have a spare key, right? Tell me you have a spare in your wallet." I said.
He didn't. He then told me of how expensive the key was and that my brother back in Olympia, who was vacationing that weekend on the white salmon river, hundreds of miles away, had the only other copy of the key.
A sinking feeling deep in the pit of my stomach started to hit me as I realized what this meant. We were stranded, 30 miles from the nearest town, with no cell phone reception and no way to start our car. So after a tense couple minutes while I was aghast at the fact that my father had no spare key, we decided that we would deal with it in the morning. His car is equipped with OnStar sattelite communication, that would be able to get us a locksmith that would come out for a pretty price, or at least so that we could call my brother and have him drive up the other key when he got back on tuesday. We had been planning to stay until monday anyway, and were set up with gear and food to get us through until then. We just wouldn't be able to drive to some of the alpine lakes that I had planned to fish during our stay. So that was that.
Friday night we tested out our homeade downrigger, and in spite of the windy chop we managed to make it across the lake and back, noticing that there weren't many people out for the evening bite. As the evening went on, the chop became increasingly vicious and a couple of times the wind blew water into our laps making it difficult to navigate. But we consistently marked fish in 80 to 160 feet of water, mostly single fish and sometimes in small schools, suspended at around 30 to 60 feet. The cool part about the fish finder was that I could mark my gear and see how deep I actually was and realized that I should have gotten a heavier ball for my rigger, because it took about 40 pulls to get it down to 30 feet, which meant that we were getting a bit of blow back . I got blow back starting around 25 pulls, and the reason I had opted for a small ball was that I thought it may be a chore to reel in something heavier with my oversized sturgeon spinning reel. I had no problem at all retrieving my big weight with the rod though, and our next trip I will definitely get a bigger ball to eliminate this problem, it would make targeting the right depth much easier.
So as we trolled the contour of the steep dropoff at the mouth of Noisy Creek, where there is a massive depth change from 60 to 160 feet in an underwater canyon which we found out later from a ranger is an old lake bed from before the resivior was built, my rod goes off and just like I've read from downrigger fishing technique articles, straightened out and started dancing, I had hooked my first sockeye! It made some crazy runs, charging the boat and I struggled to keep tension on the line even with my fast retrieving curado 701e, and I saw the fish flash beneath the boat. But somehow as the fish flopped around he managed to throw the hooks and didn't stick. That night we had two more takes, one of which didn't pop the DR clip, I think it must have been a trout or a kokanee and from that time on I set the line a little bit shallower in the dr clip just in case. We got back to camp just as dark was setting in and prepared for the morning bite and figuring out what to do about our key situation.
saturday morning we awoke a half hour before sunrise got ready in the dark and paddled out to the deep end of the lake. We started fishing on the north side of the lake, paddling into the wind, with the inent to let the wind blow us back up the south shore through noisy creek. But as it turned out, the battery powering our FF crapped out shortly into the trip, which made it really hard to judge our speed and depth. I had planned on charging the finder with my car charger, which didn't work without the keys in the ignition. Of course. So the rest of the trip we were fishing blind, which made it really a lot more work and less productive fishing.
There were a lot of guys out on the lake, but everyone was friendly and enthusiastic, we were one of the only guys out there in a non-motorized non-modern craft. That morning I missed another fish, and my dad ended up with one on the pink lady at 50 pulls as we ran through a school of fish. I probably would have hooked up, but had to start paddling and netting my dads fish. At that moment about five or six boats around us hooked up, some with doubles and triples, it was a riot. My dad was getting used to my rod, so that was exciting as the fish made significant leaps and mad dashes for the bottom, he towed us around and a bunch of us boats started drifting around towards eachother as we enthusiasticly played our fish. It was a lot of fun, and I managed to net my dads fish to cheers all around, people couldn't believe that we were actually hooking up from our tiny boat.
Shortly after that the sherrif came over to check that we were legit, and marvel at my homemade downrigger and our boat. They snapped pictures of us and congratulated us on our catch, clearly they were impressed that such a neat craft could catch fish. At about 11 am the wind started to pick up, and shortly after tha the bite died off, so we decided to go and try to get the key situation sorted.
We went back to camp, had no cell reception, so we walked up to Shannon Creek to see if the camp host or ranger could radio us some help. But Shannon Creek was primitive with no phones, so I hung back and watched our gear and my dad walked down the road to see if he could get cell reception. I had reception up until about halfway up the road, and my father didn't want to bum a ride into town, he was too proud to ask for help from other fishermen. So he walked to the Swift Creek campground, where the rangers and camp host had gone home for the day, so he kept walking until he got to Bear Creek campground and still no reception with AT&T so he turned around and luckily he got a ride back to camp or he would have blistered up his feet something awful, he had already walked like 15 miles for nothing. The nice guy that gave him a ride told him that he got calls from his buddies out from the middle of the lake all the time, so we decided to try and reach a locksmith in the morning and paddle down to Swift Creek where there was supposedly cell reception.
Sunday morning was another day of a lot of work. We managed to find fellow WaLaker Matt's boat out of the Hundreds of other boaters and swapped encouraging stories. He told us that he was nailing them at 35 feet, and we had been fishing a little shallower, although it was hard to tell because we couldn't see our gear on the finder anymore. So I dropped my gear down another five pulls and immediately had a fish on, and everyone was super excited. It was a big hen, running 29 almosty 30 inches. After that the bite died and we had headed away from the action towards swift creek to sort out this key problem.
Turns out after a lot of talking, the ranger radiod back to headquarters, no locksmith could come out on sunday, but they were pretty confident that they could find one to come out on Monday. So after a lot of drama, we found out that although you can't get a call from the top of the space needle to last more than 30 seconds, Verizon is the only carrier that gets reception in the middle of nowhere, miles from anywhere relevant at all. You could get one measly bar from the dock at swift creek, and managed to make a couple calls with a borrowed cell phone from a very impatient old man. So then we paddled back to camp, calling it a day, eating dinner and got back at about 9 pm.
Next morning I was fishing by myself, and had gotten totally used to my gear and after observing others, corrected the mistakes that had been getting us skunked the previous days. My dad left at first light to make sure that he could call up a locksmith, so I was fishing on my own. There were less people on the water on Monday, it not being the weekend, but the bite seemed to be much better for everyone, more boats were hooking up on a consistent basis.
I had kept an eye out on the folks who had been nailing 'em and figured out that I had been fishing my gear a little bit off comparatively. I used a smaller squiddy, a slightly smaller UV dodger that I use for Kokanee, a smaller hook, and on the end I put a size 0 Pink and white dick nite below a red hook egg looped above it with a tiny bit of shrimp. I trolled a little faster than I had been trolling before, probably about 1.8 to 2 MPH and fished at 42 pulls, which from my estimation based on line blowback and trolling speed was around 35-38 feet deep.
I had gotten a later start on account of working out logitistic of key problems with my dad, but paddling with only one person across the lake meant that I got their faster and in about the same amount of time. That morning in quick succession I hooked 3 fish, fought them to the boat and proceeded to lose each and every one of them while netting them. They were all bigger fish, around the 30" mark like the two that we had caught before, which was strange as I saw a lot of boat catching a lot more small fish. But their size combined with the fact that they were hooked in the lip with only the dick nite hook, which is frusteratingly small, meant that as I tried to, from a sitting position, wield my too small net, with a long leader and longer pole, try to subdue a thrashing fish while it towed my kayak around in circles and I juggled reeling in my downrigger, paddling, knocking over my soda, spilling tackle etc. it was just too cramped of quarters to land the fish on my own. The previous days I had done well with my dad their to net them, and it was frusterating afer finally dialing in this fishery not being able to land the fish. After I lost my would-be limit at the boat I called it quits early, discouraged, but heartened that I had conquered this amazing fishery, and caught my first salmon from a kayak, the biggest fish this boat has ever caught in it's 80 plus years of existence. I'm confident that on a return trip I would be able to nail these fish, even from my tiny kayak, with homemade inexpensive gear, proof that knowledge hard work and perseverence can over come budgetary restrictions and overwhelming odds.
Upon my return to camp I found a locksmith from Sedro Wooley had arrived, and was fixing our keys so we could leave. My father had managed to secure a call in the nick of time before the camp host left for the week, and the forest service office had managed to get our credit card info to a locksmith who had, coincidently been saving someone from a simliar predicament. Turns out someone had accidentally dropped their keys and camera from the dam viewpoint bridge into the abyss, and saved us $300 dollars worth of driving expense. For a total of $350 my dad was able to get two spare keys and get us on the road, packed up with our two sockeye at 1 pm on monday afternoon. Albeit after significant headaches and hassle, lots of worry and work, my father learned a valuable but hard lesson:
1) Never take non-floating keys on a boat 2) ALWAYS have a spare key.
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