Due to work schedules JoAnn and I were unable to make our long anticipated trip to Conconully (major bummer…) so instead we headed down I-5 and hit Yale and Merwin.

We hit the road at 3:30am and made it to Yale around 7ish. It was cool, a bit breezy, and cloud-covered so I put up the top and side curtains and off we went. The dogs, Rudy and Diesel knew the drill and jumped in and settled into their doggy beds. There were around 20 rigs in the parking lot.

We started just across and south of the launch on the far side of the lake and trolled north until we hit 80ish feet deep and would then run back up. Standard kokanee rigs, standard corn, and standard Yale kokanee. As in, not very big this year, I’d say a tad smaller than last year. Everything we caught was in a 10-11.5” range except for two that pushed 12.5”.

The cold front definitely put the bite off from what earlier reports were. We managed 12 for the day and lost almost as many. Very light biters today. Early on the riggers at 30 feet caught a few but it quickly switched to a leaded line show with two colors out. Trolling speed around 1.4 seemed best.

We ended up with 12 fish for our day's efforts.

No personal craft or jet buzzers around which was nice. A good first day to our short weekend. See my Merwin report for more…

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