A three day weekend is too valuable to waste on choirs – right? Well, my wonderful wife JoAnn said “let’s go camping and fishing at Yale Reservoir”. You better bet I jumped at that offer! We packed up the trucks, grabbed the dogs, and make a leisure Friday drive down to our campsite. Pitched the tent and watched a movie then it was off to bed for an early start on the water.

Yale always fishes pretty good for kokanee, the big question is how big will the fish be? In years past they were dinks, and then the past few years started to push 12-13” which in my opinion is a nice kokanee to catch, especially if there are good numbers to be had.
We had the boat in the water by 6am Saturday and Sunday. The water level is down but there is plenty of dock space and the nice thing about May fishing is the crowds are not quite as thick as in the summer.

I decided to run two downriggers for the deeper fish and two leaded lines for the top side. This seemed to be a pretty good plan. I ran a variety of my favorite gear, dodgers and various hoochies, etc. Corn, of course. The magic trolling speed was in that 1.2-1.3 range. We marked fish everywhere, more across from the Yale Park boat launch, less up by the dam. We caught fish down to fifty feet but most fish came from the leaded line rods.

The size of the fish this year? Well, not great, 10-11” was the best we could do, but there are a lot of them and I just ate one for dinner. Like eating a miniature sockeye salmon, right? Delicious!

We had two days of amazing sunny, warm weather. This was May? Wow! Check out Yale for lots of steady action on smaller kokanee. The kids will have a blast! Oh, and here’s a suggestion from a NWFR member I met at the launch – if the fish get finicky give a bare hook and a bead (with a piece of corn) a try!