It’s been a while but I finally managed to take advantage of this nice stretch of pleasant weather and get out on the lake again. Due to the recent sunny weather and winds out of the north, I figured that our best bet was to target the north facing bays and shorelines. The water was definitely showing the algae bloom and visibility was between 5’ and 10’, so I opted to start with a 50/50 dodger and green hoochie. We first worked on the north end of Mercer Island concentrating on the shallows and points without so much as a bump. Eventually we made our way over the I-90 bridge and I changed up to a white needlefish for our first pass, which proved fruitless. By the time we made it to the west end of the bridge the sun was at its apex and the winds were dead calm, so I switched over to the old standby of Abe and Al style flasher and white UV hoochie. This setup yielded a couple of fish at 35’ down on the rigger, both looked to be fat searuns and were released after a quick photo op. We made a couple more passes without any hookups then packed up and headed south. We trolled the area off of Rainier Ave for a while as well as the open water South of Mercer Island to no avail and called it a day around 3:00pm.

The good news: Water level is up to around a foot shy of typical summer height. All the areas we fished showed signs of a good algae bloom. Bait balls were seen on the sonar.
The bad news: Water temps are still in the 40’s so the fish are still in winter feeding mode. There is a fair amount of debris in the water due to the high flows a couple of weeks ago, so be careful, especially in the south end of the lake.

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