My body is telling me I’m still on the water but I am, alas, back home. Four days of fishing Lake Chelan and our Kokanee Get Together. What a great weekend it was!

JoAnn and I arrived Friday morning, having gotten up at 2:45 to make the drive and hit the morning bite. As many of you are probably aware, fishing this year has not been as hot as last year. The fish are harder to find, harder to get to bite, and generally (a tad) smaller. More 13-14” fish and less 18-20”monsters, but still plenty of quality 16-18” fish are out there.

Rather than day by day I’ll give a summary of our success.

First off, we fished a lot of different gear, bait, locations, and depths. Standard kokanee type gear in mostly pinks and oranges, with corn, sometimes shrimp, sometimes maggots. We did stay in the lower basin, fishing from Monument down lake. Some days we focused more in the Mill Bay/Monument area, some days more in the Rocky Point/Blue Roof Condos area. By far most boats were concentrated around the Blue Roof Condos.

Weather conditions were for the most part outstanding. Saturday was the day of the “Big Blow” and it was a challenge for sure. We fished until noon that day even with our deep-V and windshield had more than a few waves spray over us. My hat’s off to the open boats that braved Saturday. And the other days? Perfect, just beautiful Lake Chelan in all its glory. I think there’s no finer lake to fish on in the spring.

The fish are definitely up shallow this year first thing in the morning. And drop deep as the day progresses. It was great having so many friends out on the water and getting intel. Rseas texted me he was hitting fish down to 90-110 feet on the downrigger. Early AM fish were at surface to 30 feet deep. More than one person had a fish rip the bait as they were hooking on the clip on the DR.

The fish also seemed to like a bit faster presentation. Last year 1.2mph was the golden ticket, this year 1.4-1.7 was working well.

Our “scores” were a big disappointment from last year, but I’m still overall pleased. We went 3 for 4 Friday, 2 for 4 Saturday, 1 for 1 Sunday (ouch!) and 4 for 5 on Monday. Lots of people I spoke with scratched out 1-3 fish a day, so I guess that makes me average, LOL. As always, there were a few that caught 10-12 fish, hats off to them! We had a 50/50 mix of 13-14 inch and 16-17 inch fish. Beautiful chrome kokanee and I already know how good they taste!

On Saturday we had our Kokanee Get Together. The event couldn’t have been nicer. The wind had calmed down and were had a beautiful day. I am blown away by the incredible turnout to this event! There were over sixty WashingtonLakes members. I met so many new faces – it was hard to keep track. With all the activities going on it was also hard to meet everyone, so my apologies if I didn’t get to visit with you. This was by far our biggest event in the history of the site. We had people that drove over three hundred miles to come specifically to fish and join us at the pot luck. We had tons of delicious food. Rseas and his wife cooked us fish tacos and beef brisket, it was incredible. Thank you so much Randy and Karen for your hard work behind the grill.

After diner we had presentations from our Sponsors, Mack’s Lures Lance Merz, Hevi Beads Reed Swallow, and Fish With Gary Gary Gordon. Not present (sadly) was Wannafishalure Toni. Maybe next time Toni! Following the sponsor presentations they gave away gear. All our Sponsors were incredibly generous and people were blown away with how much free goodies they got. Thank you so much to our Sponsors. Also, thank you to Anton Jones of Darrell and Dad's Family Guide Service for his generous half price fishing trips. Our free raffle and more gifts for the WALakes members was the icing on the cake that ended an amazing event.

My heartfelt thanks go to everyone that came out and made this such a successful event. It’s going to be hard to top it, but I’m willing to try next year!

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