Fished from 9-2ish. Started out slow, I should have paid more attention to gfakkema's post cuz I wasted about 3 hrs trolling around with our gear down at ~20' to start out with. After that resulted in no action we anchored up in ~40' of water to see if any fish we had been marking on the bottom felt like biting, they didn't. So back to trolling and I put a top line out and kept the gear up near the surface between 5-10' on the downriggers so I could explore into shallow areas and learn more about the lake (first time fishing Meridian). About 10 minutes in the top line rod bends over and a nice ~15' rainbow comes to the boat, beautiful fish, nice shoulders on it, in the box it goes. Then my buddy gets a smaller 9-10" pretty skinny rainbow that we let go to get a little bigger and fatten up. For the next several hours we saw consistent action with the gear up near the surface. We did have a tough time getting fish to the boat, probably lost 7-9 fish that were hooked up, most briefly but some we saw before they shook themselves loose. The 4-5 we saw were all small 6-8" koks so it was not big loss that they shook loose but concerning that they all came off. Checked the hooks and they were sharp, not sure what that was about. Are kokanee mouths even softer when they're that small or something?
After a couple hrs of losing these little kokanee we called it a day. Weather was great, wind did start to make trolling a little tough but think it helped the bite. When the water was flat calm didn't see anyone hooking up. Couldn't believe fish were so near the surface with how sunny it was, maybe it's the time of year and something I'll keep in mind now, good learning experience.
We used dodgers and wedding rings, yellow fire corn was the bait of the day and only one that got bites.
Wife and I had the bow for dinner sat night, good stuff with the pasta salad she made to go with it. Tight lines all!