Opening day 2016 has come and is almost gone. In spite of the nasty forecast; I hitched up the Lund and headed south to Lake Stevens to do a little non-opening day kokanee fishing. Tony and I had planned to meet, fish and then he was headed for work somewhere around 8:30. The crusty old guys were both on time and we were underway by 5:30 or so. In that the wind was blowing out of the southwest we headed for the northwest area of the lake with hopes of avoiding the worst of it, well we tried…

We started fishing in 70-90’ of water and running the gear at 20-40’. Where I normally say we cycled through different set-ups and scents before we got it figured out. Today it was slam-o right out of the box and we never changed gear or scents. We had a couple 10-15 minute slow periods but overall we kicked fish booty today. Tony was running a custom silver/UV dodger followed by a custom green hoochie/spinner setup. Under my two pole endorsement I was running an orange and white dodger followed by my latest kokanee fly in orange on the downrigger rod. On the lead line rig I was dragging a pearl/pink spots Arrow Flash dodger followed by a pink version of my latest kokanee fly. All our leaders were 10-12” and we were both using Shoepeg corn soaked in Bloody Tuna overnight. With the wind our trolling speed varied quite a bit but I was shooting for 1.4 mph. Not too much more to say, no gear changes and lots of action.

We had numerous drive buys, a few doubles, lost quite a few fish and Tony went home with his fish at 8:30 and I closed out the morning kokanee fishing at 10:13 with a double off a nice meter mark (see the FF picture). Kokanee fishing done but I had not yet had my fill of wind and rain.

I headed over to the north area of the lake and fished the shallow water flats for trout. Pulling unscented 2” rainbow trout Rapalas at 1 mph in 7-9’ of water, the next 4 hours I was up to my elbows in a fish-a-polusa. I will admit that they were not all rainbows but I was pulling on something for the entire 4 hours. I caught and safely released dozens of trout, both rainbows and cutts 10” to about 18”, a gazillion perch and a yellow bullhead that was probably around 2 pounds. Today was an absolute blast, great fishing, the motor ran well and Tony made it to work on time!

---