This report is for my early morning outing during the Lake Washington trout derby put on the Renton chapter of Puget sound Anglers. I hadn't planned to fish the derby, my intention was to help out after getting in some early morning C&R action on the local river. However after checking the stream flows on Friday, and finding them running well below average, I decided against harassing the fish in the rivers and planned on fishing the derby for a few hours before running in to help with the setup. I figured the morning bite would be fairly good due to the recent new moon, as long as the weather remained stable.

I ran north of the 520 bridge and started trolling just outside of Evergreen Point at around 6:00 am. I marked some fish in the area but they appeared to be the wrong species (looked like sockeye). I continued to work my way around the points and tied into a chunky 13” kokanee at Hunt's point that I promptly put on ice. I passed over several fish without hooking up before switching to a smaller profile lure. In particular, I found a bait ball that was being worked over by a few fish and after two unsuccessful passes with a Brad's Mini Cutplug, I switched to a shrimp fly which did the trick on the third pass. That yielded my big fish of the day, a 2lb 4 oz cutt which was not enough to get me in the money this year. I continued to work over the Kirkland area, picking up 3 more fish, keeping 2 that approached 2 lbs and releasing one which looked to be of barely legal length. Fishing with bait and scent, that was my 5 fish for the day and I made my way down to Coulon Park to help get things set up for the weigh in.

The weather was not that stable mid morning, with clouds and wind moving in, it looked like it could rain at any moment. Thankfully the winds were out of the north, which made the run south much less jarring than it could have been. Despite the unstable weather, the bite did not die off completely and even picked back up after the sun broke through shortly before noon. As it turned out, first through third place were all taken by youth anglers, with the winning fish weighing in at 3 lbs 2 ozs. There were multiple reports of resident chinook being hooked so if you go out, be mindful that they are off limits along with the sockeye and any coho you may run into before the fall season.

No photos of fish, just a few sonar images. One is what I believe to be a group of sockeye, another a lone cutt near the bottom and the third is a couple of cutts working over some bait on the bottom.

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