We had an epic day on Lake Sammamish. A friend of mine and I met up at the boat launch around 10 AM. The parking lot was pretty full, so we expected to see a lot of traffic on the water. That wasn't the case, as most of the powerboats were at the north end of the lake. I assume they were chasing Coho up there. It was cold enough to discourage water skiers and wave runners, so the water looked like glass. These were ideal conditions for a couple kayak anglers.

We started out pedaling our Hobie kayaks past the Issaquah Creek. There were no takers, so we started to head north from there. It wasn't long before I had my first fish on as we hit about 60 feet of water just north of the beach. I was trolling a Tasmanian Devil Lure in Rainbow Trout pattern behind three colors of lead core line. That lure has been really successful for me over the past month.

My buddy was trolling an olive woolly bugger on a similar lead core setup. He caught three cutthroats as we made slow S turns heading east. My magical Tasmanian Devil was not keeping up, so I switched over to a black woolly bugger. I barely got the line out before hooking up. Meanwhile, Ryan had a few more on his olive fly. He was kicking my butt, so I switched up again to a similar olive-colored one. That did the trick!

The southeast side of the lake was by far the most productive. We kept moving north and south near the slow wake buoys. That netted us several more fish from small ones to a new personal best for me at over 20" long. Most of our hookups occurred at the same time as we rolled over a school. We each caught 10 cutthroat trout for the day and released all of them. Ryan lost two more at his net. The only thing stopping us was the fading daylight.

I've been fishing for cutthroat on Lake Sammamish for the last couple of years. This was by far my most productive day in both quantity and quality. I was a little surprised we didn't see any of the Coho everyone is reporting. I don't know if our tactics or location was the root cause, but I'm not complaining at all. Our target was cutthroat, and you couldn't ask for better results.

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