We had a relaxing time fishing Horse Lake today and learned a lot on our first trip to this lake.
Tom and I left home still undecided on our final destination. It’s always fun choosing a lake to fish and many factors must be considered when making a decision. I google mapped 5 lakes close enough for a day trip. Our final decision was made as we arrived in William’s Lake. It was go straight or turn left and continue on south. Simple decision right? Wrong, but we chose to go left in anticipation of finding some larger kokanee in Horse Lake (this would later prove to be false).
We launched at Cariboo Bonanza Resort. The launch fee was extremely reasonable and it was nice to have a bathroom to use after a long drive. If you haven’t launched at Cariboo Bonanza before, be prepared for a steep and slippery to walk on wooden launch which is not perfect for low riding trailers like Tom’s, but we made it work.
Now, when you fish with other people, sometimes we get ourselves “out of routine” and this is what happened at first today. Thankfully, we each checked our own launching procedures over and realized that we had both forgot to put the plug in before unhooking the boat (it could have been worse, because we could have forgot the plug at home). A simple step was missed but confirmed as missed on a routine “triple check” procedure. On a positive note, Scotty downriggers proved to be flawless and I felt right at home using Tom’s downriggers as if they were my own.
We set out on a pre-determined path to try and located some kokanee. Our first choice location proved to be unsuccessful in locating kokanee, but the second location was much more promising. After multiple hooked fish we finally landed a nice smoker sized kokanee on a tried and true pink Old Goat lure. Another one was landed not too long after on my surprise Kokabow bug lure from Alan .
We managed to tour the whole lake from end to end over the course of the day. Unfortunately, we only found a few schools at 30ft and 40ft. We tried to find schooling fish close to their staging areas for the fall spawn, but were also unsuccessful. We did witness multiple fish launching themselves vertically out of the water and they managed to attain heights of at least 5ft above lake level. I am still wondering what they were doing as I have never seen this before. What are your thoughts?
My final conclusion of the day is that most of the fish must have been closer to the surface in the 8ft to 15ft range. Next time, I’ll be trying these depths to see if it makes a difference. We managed to put 2 kokanee in the cooler for the whole day and maybe we could have improved this number by fishing closer to the surface? Of course, we also had some changing weather and this may have played a factor in the fishing as well.
All in all, I would rate today a 10 out of 10. Although we did not bag a limit, we learned a lot about a new lake in a short amount of time. We learned that the white flags in the middle of the lake straight out from the resort were not “sail boats,” but were markers for a sunken island that I knew was on the lake yet did not know exactly where. I will fish Horse Lake again one day but until then I’ll be dreaming about checking off the next kokanee lake on my list of “to dos.”