What started with a “Fishing this weekend?” text at 6:10 Thursday morning ended being one of the most incredible and productive fishing trips ever. The text string went something like this; “Fishing this weekend?”, “No, well have a bad case of cabin fever I may hit Lake Stevens.”, “Would love to do the Eastern Washington thing” and with that the stage was set. After a few more texts and a call or two later we had a plan in place. My fishing buddy Tony was going to pick his dad up in Soap Lake and then I was going to meet Tony and his father at the Spring Canyon launch on Lake Roosevelt at 5:00 Saturday morning. We were going to fish Roosevelt Saturday morning, then fish walleye on Banks, maybe bass at Rosy and then Roosevelt again Sunday morning. This report is a combined Saturday/Sunday report for Roosevelt. I also posted a Banks report for Saturday.

Friday midnight the boat and I pulled out of the driveway, I filled up the truck and boat with ethanol free gas, picked up a “4-shotter” at Bigfoot and hit the road. Although I knew where I was going, I ran in to a bit of a GPS routing issue… But even with that and playing deer dodge ball all night I arrived at the Spring Canyon launch around 4:30 Saturday morning. Tony’s dad is lifelong fisherman but being 94 you have to be a little flexible in the planning department so we had previously decided that I should launch when I got there and fish until Tony and his dad arrived. A sound plan but as luck may have it I did not have any cell phone reception. With having no way to contact Tony, I decided to stick by the area in front of the ramp and keep a sharp eye out for my guests. Key there being the “s” guests, between hookups I was watching for two guys standing on the dock. As it turned out Tony’s dad didn’t want to get up so Tony was at the ramp just after I got out on the lake but I didn’t see him. Finally about 6:00 a call came through and I headed back in to get Tony and kickoff an incredible fishing adventure.

After seeing numerous pictures humongous Lake Roosevelt Kokanee we were both geared up in anticipation of our first. Both Tony and I are seasoned kokanee veterans but nothing prepared us for the first 3 pounder! It was like an awakening. These Roosevelt kokanee absolutely crush the takedown; make numerous sizzling runs and jump so high that they frequently take the dodger out of the water. I am hooked, shoot I may even move to Grand Cooley when I retire!

We were both running our standard kokanee gear. Tony’s go-to is a Simon Kokanee dodger followed by a custom tied spinner rig. Although I have gazillion dodgers, I am a Poulsen’s Arrow Flash guy. For this trip I had tied up a bunch of an upsized version of my new kokanee flies and I was running them behind an Arrow Flash dodger. Now for a lesson learned; where I usually tie my kokanee leaders using 8, 10 or 12# fluorocarbon that is not enough for these fish. I went to 15# and was still breaking fish off. With the big jumps, violent head shakes and short leaders they just snap the lighter leaders. I went through 5 or 6 setups before I settled on 20# fluorocarbon. A side benefit of the heavier leaders is that they better telegraph the dodger action to the lure.

With the Roosevelt fishery being new to both of us and not really knowing where to start we started out in the area just up lake from the Spring Canyon launch. We were running two rigs off the downriggers on 18-48’ of wire, one surface line and a lead line rig. Our rigger set backs were 100-120’, the surface line was way the heck back there and the lead line was running at 1-2 colors with a 60’ top shot. Our trolling speed was typically 1.4 mph but was up to 2.0 mph when running downwind. After some experimentation with different colors, spinner blades and leader lengths by late Saturday morning we had it dialed in. in applying Saturday’s lessons learned Sunday morning we came out of the box on fire. We found that green or orange was the go to color. For leaders I was running 8-10” of 20# fluorocarbon. Although we tried out various spinner blades and Smile blades ahead of our custom kokanee flies the fish wanted smaller silver or brass Colorado blades. We used our tuna corn to tip the hooks (and it didn’t seem to make any difference that somebody had frozen and refrozen their corn multiple times). Our downrigger bite was at 20-30’, 2 colors on the lead line was the ticket and the surface line did not do too well. An interesting observation; most of our bites were as we were trolling down lake or away from the sun. I think that with the fish being a bit shallower the sun was in their eyes when we were trolling up lake. Kokanee sunglasses?

Although we caught fish on all the setups we drug around behind the boat, by far the lead line rig got the most action. In noticing the trend I tried switching setups on the lead line rig but the results were the same, Slamo! Although we targeted kokanee there was a fantastic incidental bite for larger rainbow. In two days of fishing the two of us we caught our limits of 18-21” rainbow retaining only 8, the ones that were bleeding.

This trip was one for the books and timely, I do not think that I will be able to get out again before sometime in July. As always our conversation was endless, even with a number of frustrating long releases we caught limits of quality fish and no one won the ongoing ribbing battle. Now who was it that said text messages suck…

---