After getting skunked last weekend, I did a lot more reading and talked with several knowledgeable folks about targeting kokanee on American Lake, and made a few adjustments to my approach. Specifically, I shortened my leaders to around 8” from the dodger to give them faster action (using 4” dodgers) I previously had them 12-15” back. I also focused on changing depths regularly- pretty much anytime I didn’t get a hit for 20 minutes or so, we’d change depths, and I also switched to using krill-scented corn. (Green giant white shoepeg corn that I treated with Pazuke orange krill Fire Cure the night before.) I had previously just used the corn untreated. I also ran my lines farther back from the boat- the front rig was 30-35 pulls back this time and the rear rig was always deeper than the front and 25 pulls back or so. I'm told that staggering the distance and depth this way gives the opportunity for fish that miss or refuse the lower rig the chance to go for the top one as it comes over.


A co-worker of mine and I met up and got on the water around 9 am. The day was cloudy and overcast, but thankfully rain free. It had rained pretty solidly the night before and the day previous.

The morning was pretty slow, and we had nothing for quite a while. About 11 am we landed one and at noon one more. Both fish were about 40 feet down in 80+ feet of water, and both were in roughly the same area so we started focusing our efforts in that range. Bear in mind that the entire time we had been searching for them, changing depths on every pass through the area we were working.

My co-worker picked up a couple more around 1:00, as well as lost a couple at the boat. He was running a wedding ring with a bright chartreuse blade behind a watermelon dodger, and I was running a green hootchie behind a splatter pink dodger. We reasoned that with the cloudy day, and limited visibility at the depths we were fishing, the brighter colors were responsible for the extra hits. I switched to a set of red/chrome wedding ring beads with a fluorescent orange blade, as well as a single UV glow bead. That seemed to help as I started picking them up more regularly.

Everything we caught was in 80+ feet of water, and from 30-50 feet deep. We had our alternate rods flatlining (no downriggers) and using weights or no weight, we ranged them from just below the surface to (I’d guess) up to 7 feet deep or so. Those never got any action, regardless of what we put on.

One surprising thing I noted about catching kokes is that they tended to run towards the boat when first hooked. Normally when I hook a trout or salmon, they pull back or dive. Nearly all the kokes tended to run towards the boat at first, which made it challenging to be sure whether or not you actually still had them on. But then partway through quickly reeling them in, they’d put on the brakes and fight back. Then they’d rush forward again. Most of the time they’d go pretty easy for most of the trip, until close to the boat, then fight hard. We ended up losing several this way, usually on the rigs where we were running only one hook. On the dual-hook rigs, this wasn’t an issue, as their extra fighting seemed to lodge the second hook somewhere else. On most of them I landed, the lead hook was still firmly in the mouth, and the second one would be either threaded all the way through the cheek (from the inside or the outside) or stuck in through the eye area. Since it was our intent to keep any of them we caught, I had no hesitation running dual-hooked rigs like this.

Things slowed down again after 2:00, and we struggled to find more of them, but had no luck at any depth. Eventually we decided to switch to drop-shotting for perch and trout, but gave that up fairly soon, both due to the fact that even at the lowest setting my 5hp kicker was a little fast for creeping along the shoreline, and the fact that one of my batteries was dead. (lesson learned here- the battery relay I have installed won’t connect both batteries when charging if one is below 10.2 volts, so charging them overnight only charged one battery)

At the end of the day, My co-worker went home with 4 kokes, and I took home 3. All fish were chrome bright.

Rating it a 3- we had a good time and caught fish, but really had to work at it.

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