Fishing Report 7-29-05

It was my pleasure to have George Harris, the director of the Northwest Marine Trade Association, and his father-in-law, Jack out this last Fri. for a kokanee trip at Paulina Lake. We meet at 5:30 at the main ramp and decided we would pursue kokanee unless they were as uncooperative as they had been of late. I think the full moon the prior week and slowed things quite a bit from what I was hearing. I had been fishing at East for browns the last few trips and hadn't fished at Paulina since before we left for vacation back in early July.

We started out in front of the resort where I pulled up after seeing enough schools in the thermocline to let me know this looked like a good place to start. After two immediate strikes in 5 minutes we thought this could be the start of something good as the old song title went. Far from it. The next hour we struggled to land a couple. We noticed that no one was catching any numbers at all. It wasn't looking that good but we hung in there. I told them we could go to East and probably scratch up a few browns if we didn't wait too long. The corporate decision was to stick it out for the kokanee. Normally, we do pretty good early in the mornings on kokanee as a general rule.

We were using Shasta Tackle Slingblade dodgers trailing Pro-Troll kokanee killers with corn and scent. The magic number was 40 feet but I did get a couple at 45-50 feet as well. We starting doing a little better as the sun got higher and then I decided to drop the offsets way back to see if that would help. I'm not sure if that was it but we did manage to scratch out 8 kokanee and 1 smaller brown and just missed our 2 limits. After getting back to the dock and hearing that no one was doing much I felt very fortunate that we did as well as we did.

Next trip will be on Aug. 1 for browns at East.

Tight Lines, Rick