Wow, wow, wow! (and that’s just for part 1 of my two day report)

JoAnn and I decided to drive up over to Cle Elum Sunday and moor the boat overnight for a two day fishing adventure. I had a revelation that perhaps the shad I recently caught would be met with approval by the lakers in Cle Elum, so I wanted to give it a try. Also, I knew Cle Elum had kokanee so wanted to check that out as well.
This report will focus on the Cle Elum lakers.

First, I must say, I learned a lot from watching Jeff Witkowski of Darrell and Dad’s Family Guide Service when we went with him on Chelan. So I was interested in using the techniques I learned and seeing how they would fair on Cle Elum. Cle Elum doesn’t have the numbers of lakers nor the size, but there are enough quality fish to make it worth a shot.

We started fishing Sunday afternoon at 2:30pm, in the heat of the day – 90 degrees+. We bought a large beach umbrella for added shade and it fit perfectly in the back of my boat, allowing full access to the downriggers and rods, but still giving additional shade protection. It was the main difference in being able to fish in the heat wave.
I spent this trip trying various ways of running our four rods, but ultimately I found the best way was to NOT stack the rods for hugging the bottom for the lakers. It just created too much drag to be useful. I know lakers can be caught suspended on Cle Elum, and have doen so myself, but decided against this approach, rather I wanted to emulate Jeff and Anton and “pound the bottom”. So the best approach was one rod “to the deck”. And as an aside, the second day I found an even better approach t=for this lake – one rod on the deck for lakers, and the second downrigger running two rods for kokanee – bonus!

Back to Sunday’s fishing. We started mid lake, about a mile north of the Wishposh boat launch, in around 120 feet of water. I don’t know names of locations on this lake, but I believe the term “Laker Alley” may be used for this spot. It’s an area I’ve caught lakers at in the past, and the bottom had good numbers fish markings. I’ll add it as a “Hot Spot” for the Premium Members.

My terminal rig was a magnum green glow hoochie with a glow in the dark skirt, a magnum smile blade in gold, two 1/0 hooks, and a strip of fresh shad brined in Nate’s Bait herring cure, with some salmon/trout scent juice mixed in for good measure. A fine cure that had the strips in good shape - oh yes, I also added some rock salt to firm it up.

I ran this set up during the day at 3-10 feet off the bottom as much as possible, at around 1.0-1.4 mph. As mentioned, it worked much better once gave up stacking. I only got hung up once, and it was the lure, not my DR ball.

I won’t pretend to say fishing was red hot, and frankly, it wasn’t very good. I had four bites and missed three, but the one I did catch, on Sunday at 3:30pm in 265 feet of water was worth the trip all by itself. The fish hit in the usual way a laker hits – tap, tap, nothing very exciting. But when I pulled the release free and felt the head shakes, and then the weight, I knew I was into a good fish – I told JoAnn “when this fish comes up be sure to net it head first – it’s a big one!” She didn’t really understand how big until it surfaced. HUGE FISH ALERT! The one thing about a laker is that when they come up from 260 feet the air bladder expands and they are toast for fighting. So it’s not a trout or salmon fight, it’s more like a head-shaking log fight. The drag never pulled once, but I had a few good lunges and head shakes. When the fish hit the surface he lay on his side and allowed me to drag him into JoAnn’s waiting net. “I can’t lift him up!” JoAnn said. I reach over and grabbed the net and into our boat came the largest laker I’d ever seen up close and personal. My first guess was 15 pounds, but my scale came in at 9.5. I think it was weighing it light, you be the judge.

So this was the only laker we caught, but I would go back any day of the week and troll ten hours to get a fish like this!

As to the kokanee fishing, be sure to check out my second report for that story!

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