Cle Elum has my attention as a close, “go-to” destination for a shot at big lakers. I’ve caught some nice fish out of this lake and wanted to share my experiences with a couple NWFR members. So Sunday, Father’s Day, I was happy to take out rseas and Randy Rauscher to share in a day of targeting big lakers.

We hit the road at 4:40am and had the bot in the water and fishing by 6:15am. Initially it was a little windy but as the morning progressed the wind died down and made for a pleasant morning of fishing. The wind really kicked into gear at 1pm, as strong as I have ever seen on Cle Elum.

We ran 5 rods, day off the bottom on downriggers, two off planer boards using 5 oz to target suspended fish, and one on a slide weight stacking off a downrigger. We basically rotated a variety of lures and bait.

Our first fish cam around 7am on a spoon off the bottom downrigger. It was Randy R’s first ever laker, pretty cool to be able to help him get his first lake trout. I think he might be hooked!

Action was not super fast this day but around 9am the port planer board was violently jerked back and pulled under water. Considering this was a bigger, 12” plus planer board I knew we had a big fish on.

The fight of lakers on Cle Elum is much more fun than Chelan – we fished the “Mac Bar” in 80-110 feet of water and that means no air bladders exploding, just good old head shakes and even some line stripping runs. This fish give me a great fight but we got him netted. At around 8-10 pounds it was a sweet fish. We would have released it but the hook had impaled the fish bad and it was bleeding. Unlikely to survive, we kept it.

We worked the bar until the wind came up, rseas had a couple of drive-bys and some fish on that came off. 1pm we called it a day. The wind was so strong I was able to practically surf the boat on to the trailer. As rseas commented, “you get one chance Mike and if you miss…”. Pretty tense but I got the boat on without issue.

Give Cle Elum a try sometime – it has beautiful scenery, some big fish, and zero fishing pressure. BTW, we weren’t targeting kokanee but did see some BIG schools on the fish finder!

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