05-28-2019, 05:00 PM
What a great weekend!!!! Even with the rough weather forecast my family and I had a blast. We started Thursday and Friday trying out from the Lucern marina. We don't have a large boat so the wind was licking our butt and making fishing tough. We were mostly targeting kokanee but in the area of Linwood bay we seemed to be more successful at lake trout pups than kokanee. We did our part to help the fishery and kept 19 pups but only managed 5 kokanee. Saturday and Monday we decided to try and find some more protected water and launched from sheep creek. I sure wish we would have started the trip in there. We were able to quickly find some willing participants and caught (landed) nearly 6 limits of kokanee. I emphasize landed because this was mostly a trip to hook kids on fishing. My 10, 8, and 5 year old sons and my daughter took control of the rods and the netting duties.... we probably lost more fish than we landed but they have not stopped talking about it and are anxious to do it again. Now I am sure that there are those out there that will not be happy about having so may long line releases on the kokanee due to their fragile nature, but like I said this was mostly a teaching opportunity to get these kids hooked, and every fish that made it to the boat was kept.
One little tip that I played with this weekend that seemed to help with the landing rates. We had one rod that had several fish in a row come unbuttoned. As a test I tried bending the hooks on the squid out slightly so that the hook end was slightly out from parallel to the shank. This seemed to produce much better hookups and a deeper bight on the fishes mouth which seemed to help significantly on getting them to the boat. In fact we only lost one fish on that set up the rest of the trip and with all those kids bring them in and netting them there was plenty of chances [
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For those going up in the near future, We were using the typical squids and dodgers. Green or silver dodgers with pink squids seemed to be the ticket. We did shorten the distance from the dodger to the squid to about 9" and were fishing anywhere from the surface on a plainer board to 30' but the most productive zone was 12-25'. Water temp was 48-49 the entire trip
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One little tip that I played with this weekend that seemed to help with the landing rates. We had one rod that had several fish in a row come unbuttoned. As a test I tried bending the hooks on the squid out slightly so that the hook end was slightly out from parallel to the shank. This seemed to produce much better hookups and a deeper bight on the fishes mouth which seemed to help significantly on getting them to the boat. In fact we only lost one fish on that set up the rest of the trip and with all those kids bring them in and netting them there was plenty of chances [
]For those going up in the near future, We were using the typical squids and dodgers. Green or silver dodgers with pink squids seemed to be the ticket. We did shorten the distance from the dodger to the squid to about 9" and were fishing anywhere from the surface on a plainer board to 30' but the most productive zone was 12-25'. Water temp was 48-49 the entire trip
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