I had my kayak in the water at 6am out of Waverly park. Was home by 10:30 so a good day. Landed 2 healthy cutts in the 18-20" range and 3 of what I believe were migratory sockeye. I was aware sockeye are in the lake now but have not caught them in previous years. I was imagining that they would be bigger but all three were in the 17-20" range. None of the fish really fought hard at all which was strange to me. Usually cutts that size take some drag and have 3 or 4 runs in them on the tackle i use and was expecting much more out of the sockeye. The small kokes I caught a few weeks ago fought harder than anything I caught today.

I was struggling with "drivebys" for the first half of the morning as well as my last few trips so i tried pulling the baits only ~25' behind the downrigger ball. This did not seem to slow down the bite but hookup rates were 100% after that. I am thinking that in a kayak the fish are not scared any noises so I should keep doing the ~25'.

All C&R today since I didn't have the time to clean any. I release them without bringing into the 'yak so unfortunately no good pics. 2 of the Sockeye had some sort of gross parasites growing on them. Has anybody else seen this?

All in all it was an awesome day on the water and i was happy to have some cloud cover with the recent 90+ days we have had.

I have so many questions for the community if anybody is interested. I have been fishing here for ~5 years but only recently feel like I have the trout trolling thing sort of figured out. FYI I solo fish from a hobie PA12 so some of my options are limited.

-How far back to you put your baits from downrigger ball? I had been doing 75' but today changed to ~25 with great results. I understand boat is different than kayak.
-Do you have days when the fish fight hard and others when they seem to swim right to the boat?
-I started using scent and I feel like i get 10x the bites i did before. I am aware of laws regarding how many fish you can catch/release with scent.
-I pretty much exclusively use an apex lure in a purple/silver color(in michigan we used to call similar patterns "kevorkian") This seems to get bites year round and catch way more than any other baits I try. I see lots of other people use blue/silver combos so this seems similar. With only one rod in the water it seems like a waste of time to keep swapping colors. What do you guys think are the best colors to try?
-How cool is it to fish in such a metropolitan area and have multiple bald eagles fly over you?

alfafish

6/24/2018 8:41:18 AM

I've been fishing a lot of the smaller lakes in the area from my Hobie Outback. Just picked up my first downrigger from a fellow member of Northwest Kayak Anglers (http://www.northwestkayakanglers.com/index.php) yesterday and need to learn how to use it. If you're game, would love to hook up for a session on Lake Washington or Sammamish to get some pointers. I just got the Outback in March and started trolling Kastmasters and the like and did pretty well. Lately I've mostly been trolling flies with fly rods and doing pretty well but want to learn how to get the deeper fish!

rmrauscher

6/24/2018 6:25:49 PM

DJ Butler is the Lk Wash kayak wizard. You should be able to find some of his reports on NWFR

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