Hit up American Lake with my father to see if we could get a jump on the Kokanee this year. I wanted to try the refurbished launch on the West side but it was fenced off and closed. It looks like they still need to stripe the parking lot and install a fee collection station, so we ended up launching at the DFW site on the East shore. We ran over most of the lake and found the water temps were between 49 and 51 degrees throughout the lake. We marked fish only in a few areas and they were between 20 and 40 feet down. For most of the day we trolled one rod up, 5 to 20 feet, and one rod down, 25 to 40 feet using spinners, spoons, flashers, hoochies and apex lures all with no luck. We did see some small trout jumping in the South end and we trolled some big lures through the area to see if we could hook into a larger predator, but no takers. We did manage to snag up three times on some derelict gear with the 3rd time bringing up 30 to 40 feet of yellow poly rope. I think the lake could use a good dredging to bring up all the junk floating off the bottom.

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