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Spent a few hours on Lake Meridian, from 10am - 2pm. I was continuing my quest to target holdover trout and avoid the freshly stocked 1/2 pound trout in preparation for the opening day derby at lake Wilderness (gained absolutely zero insight in my quest btw) I spent most of my day trolling, switching up gear, and watching the 2d sonar / down imaging fish finder screens. I caught absolutely nothing other than small freshly stocked trout. These things were schooled up on the east shore and near the boat launch in 20-40 fow. Sometimes the schools were tight to the bottom, but usually pretty well centered in the mid depths near the thermocline that is starting to form on the lake. Water temp was 57-58 degrees

I used no bait or scent (mostly), and after I got honed in on what lures they wanted, must have caught and released 50 + trout. Double after double..... all by myself. I was actually trying to shake them off of the hook behind the boat to get back in the water without reeling all the way in. I kept 4 of the wounded fish for the smoker. More on that later....

Interestingly, the eager little hatchery trout were not too interested in spoons or small spinners, but wanted something big, loud, bright or lots of aggressive action. The picture with the dick nite, gods tooth spoons, and bite me spinner is the group of lures that didn't get bit much, and the picture with the several modified plugs, 2 large dodgers and big bladed spinner is the group that caught fish non stop when combined with a big 5.5 inch dodger. Optimal speed for these trout was about 1.6 mph for me today..... with the dodger aggressively bent and 10-12 inch leaders for max action. I had high hopes for the God's tooth spoons that I recently found at work sports and outdoors in enumclaw, but they just didnt get bit like the plugs did. (please let me know if you think I rigged something wrong Mr. Elgin) I haven't given up on the God's Teeth yet though... they are intriguing looking in the water.

I ran one rod on a down rigger and the other with a 3 oz snap weight to try to get down to the larger lower sonar marks I was seeing on the fish finder. The freshly stocked trout definitely bit more in the upper water column though. Most all of the bigger fish marks were under the schools of small fish, but I had no luck getting any of those maks (whatever they were) to bite. I saw no signs of kokanee life either.

Towards the end of the day, I came back to the 30- 60 fow areas with the larger, deeper fish marks and threw several different Kastmasters at them to no avail. Even tried vertically jigging them with chunk of night crawler on a Kastmaster, but just scared them off.

When I got home, I really impressed myself with my new found youtube trout filleting technique. I'll post a new forum topic about that on the forums here later. I'll post it in the Trout and Kokanee forum section.

ElginFishing

4/26/2019 6:07:40 AM

Thanks for giving the God's Tooth some work! Looking at the photo, the blue 50/50 appears like you tied your leader directly to the split ring. If true, the action is not as good. You want to attach a duo lock snap or small swivel or use a loop knot to attach to the split ring. The perch double hook setup appears to be correct and you want to run 12" to 14" leader to your dodger with that. Lastly, not sure how many God's Tooth spoons you tried, but to be effective, I recommend having all our patterns. Typically, sometimes I guess correctly on what they want, other times, I have to work through a progression of spoons to eventually find out. In your case, I would have spent 2 to 5 minutes per pattern then change out to the next one and so on until I found the pattern and setting the fish wanted. To be effective with the spoons, you have to be willing to stick with them, do your change outs as needed and also put the hook on the other side if the current action setting is not producing after a few pattern change outs. For larger fish, you can visit my website on how to double attach the spoons to create a jointed spoon. Just fyi, pink top, rainbow trout, brown trout, frog, perch, hammered copper, yellow trout, and blue 50/50 are what I like to start with this time of year then keep working my progressions as needed. Hope this helps!

atroutfisherman

4/26/2019 6:34:44 AM

unfortunately You did not include a link to the 10 second fillet video! i would like to kknow how this method takes out the pin bones! Thank you!

Sideburns

4/27/2019 2:56:08 AM

Thanks Elgin, the blue spoon actually does have a small duo lock snap attached to the split ring, its just kinda folded up there. It didnt seem to have much action below 1.6 mph. I'll be trying those 2 spoons that I currently own at The Lake Wilderness Derby this morning! Troutfisherman..... Little stockers like that, we just eat the pin bones, the kids complain about them though! I'll try to make a video of my new filet method after we get from the derby. It's amazingly fast, and not much mess since you dont get into the gut cavity at all.

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