With it being a long workweek I let the delicate half of the fishing team sleep-in while I did some major yard work this morning. I didn’t even hook the boat up behind the truck until 10:00 or so. Late start or not, a start it was and we were motoring in Lake Stevens by 12:30-1:00. We were running 4 rods, 2 flat lined at 25 pulls and 2 on the downriggers at 8’ and 6’. We were running dodgers followed by green or orange custom tied spinners. All the rigs were tipped with anise/krill sent gel and we played with various bait offerings. We had the first fish in the boat almost immediately and then consistent action for about 2 hours. After a couple hours targeting kokanee we decided to goof off and cruised around the lake for awhile. We did slow down here and there and fish various patterns of F-4 flat fish and a woolly bugger in the shallows but aside from two hits we ended up with nothing to show for our extra efforts.

The water temperature ran 48.7 degrees to 49.1 degrees. While fishing for kokanee we varied our trolling speed between 1.2 mph to 1.8 mph. Today our magic speed was 1.4 mph. The thermocline is starting to form and seemed to run from 7’ down to about 25’. There were lots of kokanee in the lower half of the thermocline and just below it but I couldn’t get the deeper fish to come out and play. All our fish were on the flat line rigs or with the down rigger running at 6-8’. We ended up with 5 very nice 13 and 14” kokanee for the box and a number of missed fish. The largest fish was right at 1 pound. Although it was kind of blustery it was a nice afternoon on the lake.

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