Hit lake merwin for the first time with a freind that has never kokanee fished before, and we were fishing sat morning at 6ish... launched at speelyai park. Started out with glow dodgers and glow wedding ring/ hootchie. My rod had the homemade dodger and homemade "super duper glow" epoxy dots on the dodger and first hook. Charged with uv light. Probably way to bright as my glow gear had to dim down a while before getting hits. Most of those first hits didn't stick though.

We continued cycling through gear west of speelyai launch, and caught a few, but was pretty slow. We were marking fish, trolling at 1.3mph, downriggers varied between 35 and 50. So at about 9 we motored most of the way to the dam and fed seagulls pike minnows for 1/2 hour. pike minnow must be mighty tasty to the gulls, they were trying to kill each other over them.. pretty entertaining.

We tried a few different spots on the way back towards speelyai. Picked up one or two more on above deep flats outside of steeply sloped banks at about 45 feet. The underwater forests were amazing on the humminbird 859ci hd di down imaging! Very clear images showed trees reaching up higher than our gear many times. My newly made 7# lead filled pipe weights actually look like they slid across a few branches.

There weren't many boats out fishing, but we noticed most all of them were still just west of speelyai. We headed back to the motor home at speelyai for lunch. At this point we only had 6 fish on the ice.... I borrowed my buddies phone that had a working internet connection, to reread some recent fishing reports.

We headed back out and we regeared the rods, also added bigger and flashier gang trolls to the pipe weights. We immediately found and made way points of 3 areas with active biting kokes, right where a report said they would be! Just west of speelyai launch out on the main lake and on the north shore, in a cove of sorts. 11 of our 17 fish came from here in less than 2 hours! My red/orange smile blade wedding ring was on fire! pink tuna corn, so I tied one for my freind's 10 foot river fishing rod, and we were both catching constantly! we had to accurately move the gear to the fish frequently, and were sometimes definitely dragging through the trees to do so! 40 to 60 feet deep. Only caught one fish with the long line 4.5 oz "fish weight" rod, 100 feet back. Now my trolling motor battery was dying, but we were beat anyways.... we headed in with 17 fish in the cooler. 3 shy of our 10 each limit.

Hard to believe we came back with all of our d.r. weights.. and we only lost 1 fish each! best set-up was gold dodgers, pink tuna corn, and homemade orangish red beaded smile blade spinners at 40- 60ft. 1.3mph Also shortened the set back to 10 feet.

The picture of the tackle is sorted left to right by most fish caught.
Had kokanee for dinner, gonna smoke the rest tomorrow. The meat looks kinda red, but i was disappointed with the quality, getting mushy. Some had eggs that were very loose, and alot of them were slimey like a slug. Had a blast once we got the hang of it though!

-sideburns

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