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June 10th or the Lake Washington Trout Derby day has come and gone bringing an end to an interesting week. 4:00 Tuesday morning my trouper wife was heading downstairs to get something out of the drier slipped or tripped and landed at the bottom of the stairs with a broken leg. Hitting the fast forward button; (I might add, it’s Sunday morning now and I’m sitting in the ER with my daughter as I type this. She ran herself over with her boyfriend’s truck…). Saturday morning rolls around and at 1:30 the alarm goes off.

I get up and start prepping the boat then at 2:00 I ask Karen if she is up to a day on the water. Broken leg and all she was game. By 2:30 both Karen and the boat were ready. A few stops later, one each for non-ethanol, ice and drive-through coffee had us heading south on I-5. We arrived at the Gene Coulon launch around 4:30 wondering if we had the right day. We were the second boat to launch and where I had thought that it would be a busy morning the ramp and parking lot was a ghost town. Underway by 5:00 we headed for the southwest side of Mercer Island. A friend on one of the guide boats did basically the same thing but we headed west and she headed east. Neither decision was wrong but I think that she had the edge. Running only two rods for the boat we started with a Brad’s Kokanee Cutplug on one side and a WiggleFin Action Disk/double hook leader with a strip of Fire Brined herring set up on the other side of the boat.

Not being knowledgeable with the Lake Washington fishery my plan was to chase meter marks while trolling at 1.1-1.6 mph. In 120-140 feet of water I set the Outboard Pilot up to do a lazy “S” pattern on a course up the west side of Mercer Island and went gear down. Almost immediately the Brad’s Cutplug goes off and I hand the rod off to Karen. In the true spirit of the one-legged wonder she is, she expertly engaged her aquatic opponent and a few minutes later I slid the net under a plump 15 1/2“ kokanee. Ummm, kokanee? What the heck that’s not what we’re looking for so we get back to it. Little did we know, that by the end of the day all we could catch was kokanee. Normally a good thing and we did get kokanee stink off the new boat but we were looking for trout… In the end, while being conscious of the fishing with bait limit rules we caught and released numerous kokanee and put two bleeders on ice for safe keeping.

Most of our fish were caught between 18 and 38’. In an attempt to weight my offerings toward cutthroat I changed gear often. We cycled through different color squids on Wiggle Hoochies bills, various spinners including a few different color Assassin Spinners, different color Brad’s Kokanee Cut Plugs, a WiggleFin Action Disk/double hook leader with a strip of Fire Brined herring set up, spin and glow set-ups, brined cutplug herring and a few “will this work” concoctions. All our gear was tipped with either a snippet of nightcrawler, my tuna corn, my bloody tuna-garlic canned tuna or some combination of. We caught fish on everything that went over the side but all we could catch was kokanee (wha wha wha…), some perch and a very healthy squawfish. We had a great day and everything went well, we were even home for grandbaby duty by 5:30 Saturday afternoon.

This was the first time we fished the Lake Washington Trout Derby so didn’t really know what the format was. Knowing that we only had kokanee on board we took our time at the dock, talked a bit and ordered a couple burgers from Kidd Valley before checking out the derby headquarters tent. Even though it was after 2:00 they offered to let us weigh-in our kokanee but knowing that the weigh-in closed at 2:00 we declined and sat enjoying our burgers while they went through the ceremonial activities. It turns out that apart from first, second and third place they do a random drawing from the list of participants for the balance of the prizes. I like the format and everybody went home with a generous prize or goody bag. I am not sure how many participants there were but there may have been 20 or 30 registered participants. There were just a handful of cutthroat weighed in with many kokanee to fill the weigh in display ice chest. I don’t know the exact weights but first was just over 3 pounds, the second and third place fish were in the 2 pound range with the fourth place fish just missing third place. It was a fun derby with a great bunch of fishermen. We’ll be back next year we and I’ll leave my tuna/garlic corn (kokanee bait) at HOME!

The Quadfather

6/11/2017 11:09:20 PM

Rseas, so your saying only a half dozen give or take.... cutties even got weighed in, between 20-30 boats out of at least Coulon?
Man... sounds like a tough day on the big lake.

The Quadfather

6/11/2017 11:10:30 PM

I'm sorry to hear about your wife's unfortunate mishap. But boating the next day, man... you got a winner there!!

Mike Carey

6/12/2017 6:42:05 AM

Karen is a trouper! Did I read that right, your daughter ran herself with her boyfriends truck?!?!?!? How is that even possible...
Most importantly, how was the new boat? :-)

rseas

6/12/2017 7:20:37 AM

The new boat is great and we are settling into the adjusted routine. I'll like it much more once our fish catching mojo rubs off on it...

My daughter, well it goes like this:

Her boyfriend is a Navy man, great kid and in San Diego for training. He asked if he could leave his truck here while he is out of town. On our street a vehicle is considered abandoned if it isn't moved every 3 days. Sunday morning she was going to take it to work and started shuffling cars. I had previously suggested that they name his truck Christine but we won't go there.

Anyway once the cars were shuffled she got in the truck to leave for work and the E-brake wouldn't release. She opened the door, got out and pulled the release with both hands. She was successful, the brake released but the truck started moving down the street. She got caught on something, the open door knocked her down and it rolled over her arm before stopping against the curb. After it happened she went to work and called me with her story. In a never ending quest to earn a "Father of the Year" award I laughed my patootie off before offering to haul her off to the ER. She will be ok with no major injuries.

rseas

6/12/2017 7:22:01 AM

Hmmm, no paragraph breaks...

TrackerPro16

6/12/2017 8:18:46 AM

Looking at past reports for the tournament there have been quite a few more entrants. It will be interesting to see if they post the numbers.
Thanks for the report!

Fish Dawg

6/12/2017 1:10:01 PM

The closure last year may have hurt their number of entries for this year. Some of the regulars did not participate. Anyway...thanks for posting, Randy. Glad you and Karen got into some fish and got some konanee stink on the new ride.

Next time...use some of that pikeminnow for cutthroat bait. Two years ago I worked that very trick for a 3rd place finisher.

afk

6/13/2017 7:01:22 PM

Glad to here the Koke skunk is out of RED. At least Karen can ride in comfort and style. She is a trooper indeed.

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