I went out fishing with one of my sons and uncle (this was my uncle’s second time fishing for Kokanee - he also reeled in his first Kokanee on this trip). We enjoyed a sunny morning out on Lake Roesiger. We own a 12 ft aluminum boat and this was my 2nd time targeting kokanee at Lake Roesiger (my 5th time ever to target Kokanee). The other three trips were to Cavanaugh. Side note: my kids love Cavanaugh more because even though it’s a bit more of a drive, they have good success catching cutthroat while I focus my efforts on Kokanee.

We had our lines in the water at 7:15 am. It took us about 1/2 hour to reach “kokanee grounds” from the boat launch at the south tip of the lake with our 30 lb thrust trolling motor.

Once we arrived at the north end of the lake, we tried targeting kokanee in the 50 ft range as this is where a majority of our bites and catches occurred during our first trip. We couldn’t find any schools so we moved into deeper waters.

We targeted different depths with two rods set up with 2 oz and 3 oz cannon ball sinkers on sliding dropper rigs off the sides and off the transom we used our mini troll downrigger. The two off the sides were set up with a hell razor dodger paired with a pink gods tooth kokanee setup and watermelon kokabow trolling blade paired with a pink micro hoochie. The setup of the transom (downrigger) was a Mack’s UV Silver tiger sling blade dodger (my favorite so far) and a gods tooth blue nickel Kokanee rig (another favorite). All setups were tipped with pautzke fire corn soaked in pro cure garlic super jelly.

The downrigger setup caught us 3 Kokanee and we lost our 4th on this setup at the boat. The skies were sunny and the temps were warm. The water was about 65 on the surface when we started out but had increased to 68 by late morning. All our fish were caught at the northern most end of the lake , close to the red buoys near the shoreline. I made the critical mistake of trolling in between two of the red buoys (we marked a nice school of fish there. We were in about 110 ft of water when the line released off the downrigger. The line was 60 ft down) It didn’t take long before I realized we were caught on something. We weren’t that close to the closest buoy so I’m not sure what we snagged. In the end, I lost our successful gear in the middle of our “catching streak”.

Everything ended after that and the fish had no interest in the other setups. We walked away thankful for the three kokanee we were able to keep and we’re grateful for the great memories!

Tight lines!

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