05-26-2021, 04:11 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-26-2021, 05:13 PM by Jig-fisher.)
Made a 2 day trip to the Gorge with my brother and his son but basically only 1 and a 1/4 days of fishing. Arrived late Sunday, set up camp and planned an early start for the morning. Launched out of Lucerne before 6 am and tried for the big boys for the most part of the day. Trolled, jigged, tried different offerings, but struck out. We did pick up a few pups jigging, and lost a few more. We cruised around, all the way over to sheep creek, where my brother caught another pup jigging. Decided to head back to Linwood/Antelope. Hit a couple of more spots but no more action. Late in the day we headed back to the canyon where we had marked quite a few lakers on an underwater point. As I was watching the sonar over deep water a huge school of kokes went under the boat from 20 to 40 ft down. There were so many that my sonar gave me a false bottom reading. A few minutes later another big school went through, but you could see they were diving away from the boat with the big motor running. This was about 630 pm. We put the mack stuff away and put out the koke gear We ended up only catching 2 kokes, 1 bow, and a few pups trolling for kokes, had a couple of whacks and misses. The kokes were very nice and chunky. The one my nephew caught put on quite the aerial display, repeatrdly going airborne at least 10 times. It was a lot of fun watching him catch his1st koke. Headed back to camp.
We only had until around 10-ish to fish the next morning. We decided to just target kokes, so we launched about 530 and were fishing just before 6 am in the same area as the night before.We were marking quite a few schools right off the bat and my nephew put 2 kokes in the boat by 615 on pink dodger and squid. I had a couple of hits and long releases on white squid and a pink apex, but after another 30 minutes of nothing, I decided to try orange. That ended up being the ticket. With the exception of 1 on white, I had 3 in the box by 830, with another 3 that I lost at the boat, with another 2 small (8 inch) kokes released, plus 2 mack pups and a cutthroat.. My brother stuck with pink, but only got one mack pup. His son also wanted to pull a rapala or other crank on the surface, where we could have tried more koke gear, but nary a sniff on that. The sun was shining and the koke schools were getting harder to find. They were also going deeper. I finally got my last koke at 930 at 45 ft. Most were caught around 28 to 38 ft. The schools would run from 25 ft down to almost 60. We were off the water by 1030.
One neat thing we saw was a family of otters working the bank. It has been several years since I had seen an otter. There were 2 adults and 3 pups.
Got some pictures to load, but you have to open them in your browser to see them.
We only had until around 10-ish to fish the next morning. We decided to just target kokes, so we launched about 530 and were fishing just before 6 am in the same area as the night before.We were marking quite a few schools right off the bat and my nephew put 2 kokes in the boat by 615 on pink dodger and squid. I had a couple of hits and long releases on white squid and a pink apex, but after another 30 minutes of nothing, I decided to try orange. That ended up being the ticket. With the exception of 1 on white, I had 3 in the box by 830, with another 3 that I lost at the boat, with another 2 small (8 inch) kokes released, plus 2 mack pups and a cutthroat.. My brother stuck with pink, but only got one mack pup. His son also wanted to pull a rapala or other crank on the surface, where we could have tried more koke gear, but nary a sniff on that. The sun was shining and the koke schools were getting harder to find. They were also going deeper. I finally got my last koke at 930 at 45 ft. Most were caught around 28 to 38 ft. The schools would run from 25 ft down to almost 60. We were off the water by 1030.
One neat thing we saw was a family of otters working the bank. It has been several years since I had seen an otter. There were 2 adults and 3 pups.
Got some pictures to load, but you have to open them in your browser to see them.
