Good to be back fishing on the cooler side of the State, I’ll take lower 70’s over mid 90’s any day of the week. I had the pleasure of fishing with someone I met at a Puget Sound Anglers of Lake Washington meeting in June, who had expressed interest in getting to know Lake Washington a bit better. We headed North out of the Newport launch shortly after 9:00am and went to check out the 520 bridge situation. There was a lot of barge and crane activity along both sides of the bridge, so we worked the waters a bit further North to escape the traffic and anchor lines. Dragging mini hoochies, mini Apex lures and Needlefish we brought 6 cutts to the boat, 1 resident chinook and several kokanee. The majority of the fish we caught were within 10’ of the bottom the others were suspended just below the first thermocline. We gave the North side of I-90 a try, before coming in, and I managed to pick up a cutt shortly after we started our troll. We released all of our fish today and tried to get some pictures of fish while they were still in the water. Jim managed a very nice picture of one of my cutts, while I did not do so well with his fish. Couldn’t ask for much better weather, the wind held off until around 1:30pm when it started to pick up out of the West and the pressure was fairly steady around 1018mb. If you plan on hitting the lake for some action, keep your gear near or below the first thermocline which is sitting around 45’ at this time.

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