I love exploring new lakes.
Today we decided to go kokanee fishing at Puntchesakut Lake for the first time.
Our adventure started with a decision to go for a morning breakfast at Sylvia’s Café. We have always enjoyed going for a Sunday drive for brunch here and now we had another reason to visit a great place with great food before a day of fishing.
Choosing a day to go fishing is sometimes a “luck of the draw” decision. A busy schedule and family plans can reduce the odds of fishing for kokanee on a day when the they are “happy” and the sun is shining. Today was our “scheduled” day to go fishing and as luck would have it, the sky was full of clouds and the weather was pushing in with gusts of wind and rain. Sadly, this was our day to try and shine and entice a bite.
We launched at the Puntchesakut Lake day use boat launch. As suspected, the parking lot was almost empty and the only boat on the water was leaving when we arrived. The lake was ours to explore.
I was not expecting much on a day like today. I knew our timing was a little early for this time of the year, given the elevation of the lake. Puntchesakut is about a week or two behind compared to Ten Mile and it showed. The visibility under water was two to four feet at best. The brown tea stained water made choosing a dodger and lure a difficult task.
As we trolled around the lake exploring potential kokanee “hot spots” we started marking fish as soon as we left the launch. Some areas held more fish than others, as expected. I worked my way around the lake in a methodical fashion. My pre-trip inspection of a Puntchesakut lake bathymetric map proved valuable as I was able to break the lake down into manageable zones to explore in a grid like pattern.
The surface temperature ranged from 55 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit depending on which area and depth of the lake we were trolling in. I focused on the warmer zones of the lake in anticipation of finding the “zone” where territorial kokanee might be hunkered down during the ever changing weather.
The warmer section of the lake produced our first and only kokanee of the day. However, I marked more fish in deeper water which appeared to be active at all depths. I marked fish from 15 to 35 feet that seemed to be on the move and I was hopeful to intercept one of these fish. Unfortunately, after many attempts at targeting these fish at different depth and setback combinations I came up empty handed. I started questioning if these marked fish might have been coarse fish that reside in the lake.
To sum up today, we enjoyed some time on the water in search of some unwilling kokanee. This new fishery has a promising future. Angler effort appears to be low at this time and hopefully the fishing will get better as the year and years go by. I look forward to exploring Puntchesakut at least once more this summer to see how the water visibility improves over time. The brown stained water is comparable to Mcleese Lake which has a healthy population of kokanee. I will be back and hopefully we can find some fish that have been gorging and growing on the local food sources the lake has to offer. If they have not grown to a good size by now, I’ll be back again next year, because I want to be there when this new fishery takes off.