After taking my wife to the airport this morning, I decided to hit the lake early before picking up my fishing partner from Luther Burbank Park. The wind was fairly stiff at and out of the southwest when I started and I focused my efforts on the north points of Mercer Island. Despite marking bait and fish, I found I could have better spent the time sleeping, with not even a drive by in 3+ hours. With my fishing partner on board around 10:30 we headed up north for the rest of the day's fishing. We ran through a few different setups before we found one that the fish liked, a teardrop style flasher in front of a pink Brad's Mini Cutplug. The bite was consistent, and even predictable, with fish showing on the finder resulting in hookpus. It doesn't get much better than that. With the heavy boat traffic, all the fish were caught 35' down or deeper. Longest fish of the day one would swear was a steelhead, given its body shape and acrobatics during its fight for freedom, I wish I hadn't smudged the lens of my camera before taking its picture.

Interestingly, though we had out two rods, only one received any attention. After I had my second fish to the boat, using the above mentioned setup, my partner switched to a very similar setup, a silver dodger in front of a rainbow Brad's Mini Cutplug. Several more fish later on the pink lure and we switched him out to the exact duplicate of what I was using. I even rigged it, just in case it was something on his hands causing the disparity. Despite the fact we were running identical gear, mine still continued to receive all the attention. The only difference we saw was that I had a 30' leader of Ultragreen on the end of my braided line where as his rig had his black Spiderwire running all the way to the terminal tackle. To be sure, he'll be running a mono leader on the end of his mainline next time he is out fishing.

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