We had a guest from Alaska and she wanted to go fishing. So she is telling us about all the Copper River salmon they dip net every year and I’m thinking It’s going to be hard to top that around here. I considered hauling her off to one of our local rivers to have a whack at the coho and then thought better of the idea. We settled on a kokanee trip to Lake Cavanaugh so off we went. It turns out that it was a short lived trip. It was cold windy and raining…and the fish were in a cooperative mood.

With my 2 rod endorsement we were running 4 rods. One was run off the downrigger, two lead line rigs and one flat line. We fished swing blades, UV dodgers and a gang troll. We started out trolling at 1.0 mph and then increased our trolling speed 1.5-2.0 mph. Running the increased trolling speed the fish were not picky, they aggressively attacked our custom spinners, mini squids and spin-n-glow set-ups. All presentations were tipped with a piece of our specially fed worms, corn or a combination of the two. We fished the lead line rigs at 1 color, the flat line at 20 pulls and I chased meter marks with the downrigger rod. Final count; less than two hours of fishing and 15 kokanee to 14”

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