Our family’s favorite lake is Fish Lake. Three generations have been fishing it and while we may not always get limits, the calmness and beauty of the lake are one of its attractions.

Today, our oldest son turned 9! He is an avid fisherman and specifically asked to go fishing at Fish Lake to celebrate his big day. We made the almost 2 hour trek and arrived at just before 9 am. The windy app predicted no wind - just a mild breeze. Upon our arrival, we were greeted with more than just a little wind.

Scott (owner of The Cove) was super friendly and helpful as always. He recommended we stay within the cove as the winds had picked up quite a bit and we were using a 55 lb thrust trolling motor.

After getting our boat out of the back of the pickup truck and into the water, it was fishing time!

The water temp was around 57 degrees on the surface. We tried still fishing with an anchor for a while in an effort to avoid battling the choppy conditions- my son snagged a perch but lost it at the boat.

I decided to switch to trolling and intended to troll one of Scott’s Wedding rings with some worm but didnt feel like setting up any new rigs in the windy conditions so ended up with a mouse tail (which I’d already set up on our rod). Went awhile with no bites until we finally had our first fish on an hour or so after we started fishing! It was an 11 1/2” rainbow. It was a struggle to reel the fish in due to some issues with the reel so I “retired “it after catching that fish.

For fun (and since my son had our only other trout rod) I decided to long line my pre-rigged Kokanee gear out 100 ft. I used a skateboard style dodger glow/red splatters and a blue/silver gods tooth spoon tipped with pink maggots soaked in pro-cure garlic super gel.

My only regret with this setup was not using it sooner! We went from a slow and windy day of fishing to a chaotic but productive day of fishing! We even got our gear stuck between the transom and the motor- we managed to get it free without the line getting caught in the propeller-only to discover we had a fish on the end of the line! We went home with 5 rainbows and one Kokanee (and we lost 3 fish) + plenty of fun memories and stories.

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