This past Sunday marked the last day of another great fishing vacation.
Our family was originally planning on fishing Purden lake, but the weather was not looking promising. We opted to cancel our 5hr return driving trip and stay a little closer to home. We liked the idea of catching a limit of 10 kokanee each so we decided to go to Tyee Lake instead. This would shave off 2 hours of travel time and this made the driving manageable for a day that looked like it was going to be full of wind and rain.
In the morning, we all seemed unwilling to crawl out of bed. A late night around the campfire and an undesirable cloudy (and potentially rainy) day had us all sleeping in past our departure time.
Luckily, there is no shortage of kokanee lakes close by so we decided to fish Ten Mile Lake after a debate over breakfast.
When we arrived at the lake, we met 2 of our members from the group at the boat launch. It was great to meet them and talk about fishing. I had no idea that this day would become my most memorable moment kokanee fishing with my family.
Our starting setup consisted of the same lures and dodgers I had been using all week at Sulphurous, Ruth and Ten Mile. This time, both setups produced equally well, which made for some exceptional kokanee fishing.
Choosing a place to fish was easy. Austin suggested we start trying right away and I knew a spot that was close by. We would spend the next 5 hours fishing this spot and one other spot to get our first kokanee limit as a family ever.
We ended up landing 20 kokanee that came home with us. I filleted them on my new favorite Fillet Away Fish Mats as soon as we got home and finished the trimming on a regular cutting board. We lost just as many, if not more kokanee before we got our limit too. It took a while to figure our why we were loosing so many.
During the trial and error process of attempting to determine why we were loosing so many kokanee, I tried multiple techniques and gear adjustments. First, I changed my hooks. I made sure they were laser sharp which only seemed to help slightly. Second, I played with different distances behind my downrigger ball. The idea was that when fishing at 25ft off our Scotty Fishing Products downrigger I could get away with a 30, 40 or even 50ft setback. Unfortunately, this was not the issue in the end, so I returned to our standard early season setback of 75ft (which follows the 100ft rule exactly). The third thing I tried was scent. It did not seem to matter what scent we used. We were still loosing kokanee before we could get them to the net. I then tried different depths to see if I could find kokanee more willing to bite down on our hooks. They seemed to be short striking our lures and I hoped to find more aggressive kokanee willing to chomp down. Again, depth did nothing. Lastly, I tried increasing my speed to try and entice a harder strike. Could this be the missing piece of the puzzle?
As the wind picked up and pushed us around the lake quicker than we wanted, it seemed that the kokanee bite was turning on. While unpleasant to fish in, the wind was actually helping increase our boat speed which in turn seemed to increase our hook up to landing ratio.
This day was definitely one unique day. You would almost have to see it to believe it. Unfortunately, we decided not to film this day and I might regret that decision for a while to come yet. Thankfully, we were able to get someone to take a family photo of us. We do not have many recent photos of our whole family together and what a better time than any when we had a limit of kokanee in the cooler. And so, with smiles and feelings of accomplishment, we marked another successful day in our minds and took only pictures and left only footprints in the sand on the beach.