In spite of the forecasted storm we decided to head south and fish Lake Stevens this morning. Although it was windy the rain never materialized so it wasn’t wet and miserable on the lake. We dropped the gear just outside of North Cove and started trolling northwest. We worked the 80-100’ line along the northeast shore of the lake, making a circle towards the aerator and back most of the day. It was tough fishing and we went through many different lure/attractor/bait combinations before we figured the fish out. Once we were on, the hits were fairly consistent but unfortunately we were also down to the last 1/2 hour or so of our fishing window.

We started with two rods on the downriggers running 8-38’. The downrigger rods were set-up with a dodger/spinner on one side of the boat and a swing blade/spin-n-glow on the other side. We flat lined the other two rods both set up with swing blades and custom tied spinners. I won’t go into all the changes we made through out the day but will share what finally worked. Our go to set up for the day was a double hook spinner rig, size 3 hammered brass colorado blade, orange beads running 1’ behind a UV swing blade. The rig was baited with Shoepeg and anise/krill gel and run on the surface about 50’ behind the boat at 1.4 mph. We kept 2 fish, one a fat 12” and the other around 10”.

The water temperature varied between 43.9 and 44.7 degrees. There were localized areas where fish were jumping but the fish seemed scattered today. As with last weekend, many of the fish that were jumping were nice sized fish. Both the fish we kept were absolutely packed with plankton. Another couple degrees and it will be lights out fishing.

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