My wife was planning to go with me on Sunday, but ended up coming down with some kind of stomach bug, so I went alone. I got on the water around 9:30. There were 4 other boats I spotted out there, but by late afternoon they were all gone, presumably to go watch the game. As a non-football fan, I was quite happy to have the whole lake to myself. :)

I started out targeting the same depths and areas where we had success the day before, but had no luck. I switched the downrigger depths pretty often, trying to find where the fish might be, but didn’t hook anything for quite a while. None of the other boats I talked with early in the day had anything either. Sunday was colder than Saturday, but the sun was bright. As with Saturday, I’d see the occasional blip on the depth finder, but they were always at different depths. (I expect that the even temperature of the water means the fish could be pretty much anywhere.) Most of my approach was the same as the day before, changing depths and colors fairly often. The only big change was using some anise/shrimp scent on the dodgers in addition to the krill corn on the hooks.

Around 12:30, I picked up one- it was 60’ deep in 85+ feet of water. Then I had nothing for another 45 minutes or so.
Sometime between 1:30 and 2:00 though things really took off for a short period. I was lowering the front downrigger to 20 feet, and my line came off the clip halfway down- when I went to reel it in, I discovered why- a koke had grabbed it on the drop! I'm glad I was dropping it slowly. I landed the fish, re-baited the rig and was preparing to drop the ball again, when the rear rig went off (I had a bell on it). That one was 55 feet down. So in one small area there were fish at both < 20’ and > 50’ deep.

I got the second fish off, dropped the rig and went up front to drop the front one. About 10 minutes later I caught another one on the front rig. So now I was at 4 fish for the day.

Then the bite was gone. I spent the next couple hours trying to find them again, varying depths, refreshing bait, etc. But nothing. As the sun dropped a bit and the shadows grew longer, I saw more surface action, so tried trolling a surface line. I also played around with my fly rod a while trying to tempt surface trout, but to no avail. Eventually I decided to just call it a day and troll back to the launch, and it was then that I hooked into #5.

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