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Another trip to Baker and after some scratching around, a few more sockeye in the net. My son and I headed up to Baker Lake Wednesday evening for fishing on Thursday. We fished for a bit Wednesday evening, less to catch fish than meter around and map out my plan for the morning. Plan in place we head for a calm area to set the hook for the evening. After dinner and an intense game of checkers we set the alarm and turn off the lights. Ahead of the alarm I wake up at 3:00 and see that my son is shivering so I get up, give him my blanket and get the boat ready to go. Anchor stowed, I run to an area where I was metering a lot of fish the night before and my screen lit up with sockeye.

At about 4:15 I figured there was enough light to get the show on the road and it was gear down. I was running 4 rods, 2 off the down-riggers and 2 with 3 ounces of lead. I started with the down-riggers running at 12’ and 18’ and the other rods at 16 pulls and 21 pulls. Almost immediately one of the surface rods goes off and a little while later the first fish of the day is in the net. Thinking this is good, we’re going to make a short day of it and would catch breakfast and COFFEE on the way home… We were running “0” 50/50 dodgers or a chrome dodger I had doctored up with gold prism tape followed by a variety of pointy offerings tipped with cured shrimp. For the next few hours we had slow but constant action but had trouble getting a fish in the net. We lost a few fish in mid-fight and lost a few at the net. At some point I started switching gear with the hopes of improving the slow but constant status.

We went through a number of setups, including a few versions of rigs with smiley blades when I stumbled on the days go to rig. It turned out that a single 1/0 red hook or one of my sockeye flies with out smiley blades on a 7” leader was the ticket. Once we had it dialed in the action went from “slow but constant” to on fire and we had our limits onboard in short order. I know crazy, but the trolling speed was critical yesterday. We would only get bit if we were doing exactly 1.1 on our GPS/fish finder. Ever though we saw deeper meter marks, all of our fish hit at 18-28’.

We had a great trip and the father/son time was thoroughly enjoyed. While on the water we talked to our fearless leader (WL Mike) and his wife. They have a nice setup and it sounded as though they had had a successful trip.

Mike Carey

7/27/2012 11:28:00 AM

good seeing you two on the water. Thanks for the tips, hope to improve our success rate with them next week. Very cool pic BTW, thanks!

Toni

7/27/2012 11:31:00 AM

Nice report as usual.

HoytDaddy_6

7/27/2012 7:13:00 PM

How are you fishing the shrimp?? Curing it, just shrimp on a red hook or what?? Thanks

ROTTEN CHUM

7/28/2012 10:07:00 AM

Hey Rseas...try running an owner or gamu #4 treble behind your single hook...once you get them stuck they rarely come undone...it's legal too...

LiveAsYouWill

7/28/2012 10:19:00 PM

ROTTEN CHUM... is this legal to apply to lowland-lakes? i have only been running dual-gamu spaced w/ countless types of bait....

strider43

7/30/2012 11:00:00 AM

rseas,
how much line do you let out before attaching the line to the line release? when you mark fish at 20' do you put the release at 20' or is there drag in the gear that takes it deeper, do you put it at 18' when the fish are marked at 20?
I fished the past three days there without a bite. Trying to figure how to catch these fish. I was using mini squids with scent and bait, I will try plain hooks next time as you mentioned was your go to setup.

rseas

7/31/2012 7:26:00 AM

Strider, sorry for the slow reply. I haven't started up the computer in some time and it is a pain in the tail fin to type something out on my phone. For the Baker lake sockeye fishery I run about 30' from the clip to the dodger. I am not sure it makes a difference but while fishing Baker Lake sockeye I usually attach the clip directly to the eye on the down-rigger ball. My thinking is that if you were running the standard salmon set up where your ball may be 5' or so below the first clip, the ball would scatter the school before your dodger and hooks are in the target zone. When I am chasing meter marks I usually run the clip/ball about 5-8 feet above the center of the meter mark. I also try to run a straight course after a meter mark. Theses fish follow out of a meter mark for some time before they hit. It sounds like you are running the right gear so keep at it and good luck.

rseas

7/31/2012 7:34:00 AM

Chum, thanks for the thought. I have typically been running a single hook "stinger" and in the big picture we are loosing very few fish. For our boat it has been a very good year on Baker so a few lost fish make for interesting fish stories.

rseas

7/31/2012 7:41:00 AM

HoytDaddy, I am cutting the fresh shrimp up into little pieces and then curing them with Pautzke's FireCure. When fishing, I pin a hunk of the cured shrimp on the lead hook if running a two hook rig or just on a single red hook, with both set ups run 7-10" behind a dodger.

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