My friend and I had heard about Billy Clapp lake but never fished there. Reports mention kokanee, walleye and big trout, and since my friend had never fished using downriggers nor for kokanee, we decided to fish for them. The weather forecast was not good for the day, with light rain forecast, but it was supposed to end around 11am. Well, it did rain, but we pulled out of the water at 1pm, and it was still raining. We stayed under the boat cover most of the time, but we were still wet and cold.

The kokanee were nowhere to be found. We launched by Pinto dam and circled around the deeper water in around the dam and launch, and while using side imaging I did spot what looked like kokanee a couple times, we never saw them below us and got zero bites. We gradually worked our way up to, around and past the basalt rock, but still didn't mark kokanee. We worked our way back to the launch on the west side of the lake and no kokanee. So the kokanee were hiding from us up all morning. We covered roughly the lower half of the lake, so maybe they were all hanging out in the upper half.

We also hugged the shoreline in areas that looked like walleye habitat, but I saw no walleye using side imaging. Anywhere. The silver lining in the day was that we did pick up three really nice rainbows that hit our kokanee gear. I didn't measure them, but they were big enough to produce some nice filets, as seen in the photo. We were using pink or purple hoochies behind dodgers, with scented corn. Two of the fish were caught on a downrigger, one around 25' and the other 40'. We caught another on a lead-core line 3 colors out the back of the boat. We lost a 4th trout that was really big - it slammed the hoochie on the lead-core line and did all sorts of aerobatics and got off the line. We also had two hits on my friend's setup on the downrigger that released the clips, but we don't know if they were kokanee (unlikely) or trout.

It was a disappointing day, but some of that was the weather. I do hope to get back this next week to fish the upper end of the lake, but my first attempt at Billy Clapp lake makes me question whether this lake will remain on my list of places to fish.

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