The lure of a sunny 70 degree day in October was too much and I took the bait. We don't have much of this weather left in the year, so I broke with tradition and went fishing on a weekend on Sammamish. A friend of mine needed to get out and hasn't due to additional work for a few months. The weather prediction delivered as promised, but the hope of good fishing was vanquished.

We started fishing at about 9:30 am. It was sunny at the launch, but about the time we got to Anderson Beach area, it was heavily fogged in. We worked slowly up to a spot near Sulphur Springs, but visibility was less than 50 feet. My friend had some hits, but no connections at 35 to 40 feet deep, and I picked up on dink smb. A few taps, but not full takes. The fog lifted around 11 am, so we went across to the westside. I finally found a small group of fish on some structure at about 45 ft. I caught this trout pictured and a 15" smb on a dropshot. My friend had several takes, but lost the fish each time on the retrieve. After a bit it went dead again. We went a little further north, but I could only find small fish near the bottom at around 50 to 60 feet deep. We picked up a few perch at that depth, so I assume that was the majority of what I was finding. After that we went back to an area near the launch that I have found schools of perch and crappie last year, but nothing ever showed up on the sonar of any magnitude. I did do a short troll across the lake where I have picked up trout trolling earlier this year, and did find small schools of fish at around 40 ft. They were probably trout, but not thickly schooled.

The final body count was two perch, two smb, one trout for 5 hours of fishing. Probably my slowest day yet at Sammamish. I should have followed others lead on winterizing instead of fishing, but I did so well last year in the same spots under very same conditions at this date. I did a lot of slow trolling with the electric just to scan with sonar, but found no groups of fish in any area like I typically do. I scanned everywhere from 20 ft 65 ft deep. I didn't talk to others, so I don't know if anyone else had better success.

---