JoAnn and I and our dogs did the sleep over in the boat Sunday night for a day of fishing Monday morning, with high hopes for some great fishing. Tried a little evening fishing but had no luck, so we settled in to a relaxing evening and watched a movie.

If you know Lake Wenatchee, you know that about noon or so the wind starts coming up and the lake can get pretty choppy and full of whitecaps. Well, we started fishing at 5:30am, and by 6am we had whitecaps on the far west end. Not good! It makes for tough boat control and keeping gear tracking properly. It also blows off all the car toppers. Most of them were gone by 9am or so. Not a very big crowd of boats today.

We fished four rods, two with three hooks, two with two. Dodgers on all rods. Used multi-colored hooks, pink-type squids, short leaders, in short, a variety of set ups. All rods got a fish today, including one gently released dolly.

According to a fish checker, there are about 40,000 sockeye in the lake. We marked fish constantly, and all over the west side of the lake. We started kind of deep and dropped lines down fairly quickly. The deeper fish are totally biting so don’t be afraid to drop to 70-90 feet if you see the marks. We got four fish from 60-70 feet deep, and a nice 9:30 bite which unfortunately for us was also a dog potty break time. Came back from that and didn’t get another bite.

We fished until 11am, riding the surf back to midway on the lake and called it a day when both dogs decided to upchuck. Felt badly about that, they had done great on all our previous trips, but it was just too rough today. Fortunately they are back to their happy barky selves now.

The fish are turning, but flesh is still good. That said, they definitely have a timer going so if you want to keep these fish, sooner is better.

---