After reading the recent reports on Lake Washington kokanee I found myself with a free weekend, no commitments, ya! On top of that, my wife JoAnn was down with doing some fishing so we looked at our options and decided to see if we could find some of the quality kokanee that other NWFR members have been catching.

We launched out of Magnusen Park at 5:15am and ran over to Kirkland. Runing two rods off of downriggers we focused on meter marks in the 20-50 foot range. We ran kokanee specific gear with cured corn back 30-75 feet from the clip.

The action started slow but we soon started getting kokanee hook-ups and the fish were as nice as previously reported! First two fish were lost at the boat, but the third made it to the net, a super fat 14” shiny kokanee. Nice! The fish was caught at 35 feet deep on a hoochie and dutch fork custom lure orange blade. These blades are beautiful and are transparent, better to show the hoochie or beads that you pare them with. I’m a believer as all our fish came today on this rig.

After the 14” kok things died off so we worked our way north along the 70-90 drop-off. Around 9am the deep rod again exploded and I caught and released a beautiful 20” cutthroat. We continue over to Juanita Bay and got a nice rainbow, and marked a lot of non-biting fish, which I would guess were indeed kokanee. The wind was blowing cross-ways to us so rather than have JoAnn suffer the cross-pounding we ran across to the west side of the lake and fished the bay north of Magnusen Park. We marked a few fish, not nearly as many, and called it a day at 10:30am.

Not red-hot, I think the low pressure front killed our kok bite. I did run into NWFR member “FishDawg” who relayed similar tough fishing on his boat. Going back out again tomorrow for Round Two!