Baker Lake 2019, trip two! I headed up to the lake Tuesday evening launched and found a cove to anchor in overnight. Doing the overnight thing seems to work very well. I get a few quiet moments to read and some solid sleep time. I was up pulling the anchor when the alarm sounded to let me know it was 4:00. For this trip I had a plan to go exploring and look for fish out of the crowd. That said, just to see what there was to see I did do the run up past Noisy Creek and down the other side and did see a few fish on the meter. My focus though was to fish the shallower areas of the lake and look for willing biters.

I started in 40-50’ of water in the general vicinity of Sandy Creek. Knowing that the area is loaded with stumps I was very attentive to the meter as I worked the area. It was mostly single meter marks that were hard to stay on top of. The fish were definitely on the move. I was able to get a fish in this area and if I had really worked the area over, I think it would have been productive. My goal was to work many different areas of the lake to see where the sockeye are holding this year. That said after the fish was on ice I moved on.

Previous years I have had good luck working the flats and old river channel at the far end of the lake. As previously noted, I did the loop through the Noisy Creek crowd and although I saw a lot of meter marks minimal fish love for me. I moved to the edge of the old river channel where I found a ton of fish holding right along the edge of the channel and they were snappy almost immediately I had a double and was able to put # 2 in the box. Knowing that the fish were there and suspecting that they would come out to play if came back I stuck with my plan moved on.

I worked my way over to the flats and concentrated my fishing in 30-50’ of water. Apparently, it was a good choice because after a couple drive-bys one of the rods gets hammered and I knew it was a special fish. As the fish was on the first of many long runs the second rod goes off. Knowing that the fish I had on was a big one I reached over, locked the rod holder on fish two and got to work fighting the monster. The fish was a hot one and had no intention of making it easy on me. At one point the two fish thought it would be funny to see how many times they could wrap the lines around one another. After a bit of a hectic 10 minutes or so I was able to slide the net under my biggest sockeye of the year. The fish weighed in at just over 9 pounds and I had my 3 fish limit on ice.

Based on my previous trip I made a few gear changes. I downsized lures and was also running just a magenta bead between two hooks. I was still running chrome and mylar “O” dodgers but I was fishing a sawed off pink mini hoochy on one side and the two hook/bead set up on the other side of the boat. Although the fish showed interest in both rigs, they favored the bead setup. I was tipping the lead hook with pink cured shrimp. As with my previous trip the fish were more aggressive when trolling .8-1.0 mph.

Always a learning experience and this trip was interesting. It seemed that the more active fish were off of single meter marks. Most of the action was with single meter marks right on the bottom. On this trip the fish were keyed in on pink and didn’t even look at the orange I briefly offered. I did get a fish off of a meter mark at 76’ when I was working through the crowd but it didn’t quite make it in the net.

All in all, it was a great trip and I made it home and had both the boat put away and fish cleaned before the wife got home from work!

---