[tal0362]

What a beautiful day up in the mountains. We arrived at 6 am, it was a little foggy early. We trolled from Sunset boat ramp, along the west shore, over to the pump house, to Columbine and several passes along the northern shore of Arapahoe bay. We caught 20 maybe more lakers (17-22), one 19" brown, a Kokanee, and Rainbow. We lost 3 rainbows and another Kokanee at the boat, as well as 4 or 5 lakers - lazy - we were trying to lift them into the boat without the net. The lakers were mostly 40 to 60 feet down and most came off downriggers - spoons tipped with a small piece of sucker meat was what worked for the lakers.

A lot of rainbows were rising in areas so we stopped for 20 minutes to see if we could get them to take something other than a fly - we didn't bring fly fishing gear. They wanted fly's not kastmasters, worms, or salmon eggs.

I had my APS film camera, so there will be no pictures today, gotta use up the roll.

Terre

 

[QuickRelease]

Sounds like you had a great time. I've got to learn how to catch those lakers. ??? Don't have a downrigger though. Think you can get down to them with lead-core line? I think I can get down to about 40' with a fairly slow troll. How fast are you trolling?

 

[tal0362]

We were trolling 1.8 to 2.3 mph on the GPS. Lead core will work, we also use spectra super line and weight, especially for bumping along the bottom (ie wire line). The only problem is you don't know exactly how deep your fishing if your not touching the bottom now and then. Many of fish we caught yesterday were suspended in 60 - 90 feet of water, near the sloping bank.

In some areas there were some clouds of stuff on the fish finder near bottom. We have seen it many times in the past but got a better look with the color fishfinder. It's not solid, you can see bigger fish within the cloud... It's not a thermalcline, they almost look like balls of small bait fish. Anyone know what that stuff is?

Terre

 

[QuickRelease]

Could be schools of small kokanee. I don't know of anything else that would be that deep. Does plankton hang out that deep? ???

 

[DHotRod]

Quickrelease,
You don't need a downrigger to get to them. The bass fisherman (?) use a Fishseeker to get down to the stripers when they go deep. I have used them to bring up 15 lbs stripers in 70 plus feet of water.
I'm not saying they are better then my Walker Downriggers, But they do work well. They are about 6.00 dollars and they are the best thing next to a downrigger. Cabela's has them so does Bass Pro.
In New Mexico Nobody uses downriggers, they use these seekers. Give them a try..... Your going to like them. Good luck

 

[kokaneeking]

talo what did you catch the kokes on ?

 

[tal0362]

The Kokanee and rainbows came on pop gear, with z-ray or dicknite.

MB is also right, you can use dipsy's, or fishseekers (new to me - less expensive), to get your bait down to suspended fish.

If those clouds of whatever down deep are small kokanee - there are lots of um! Should be pretty good forage for the other bigger fish.

Terre

 

[IceInTheVeins]

Have any of you heard of any bigger lakers caught lately?