I decided to brave the cold weather with a friend to see if we could put some fish in the boat, on the first fishing trip of the new year. I heard that the perch bite was pretty good and thought we would start the day off putting some perch in the cooler. This was my first attempt for Perch at Lake Washington and it was unsuccessful. We tried over by the sea hawk training facility and pleasure point, but could not locate any schools. We targeted the 55-65 ft. range. I guess they moved elsewhere in the lake. We decided to give up after an hour and a half of searching and decided to focus on trout. We motored over to the south end of Mercer Island and put a wiggle hoochie on one rod, and a rainbow patterned lucky craft on the other rod. The action started off pretty swift with the lucky craft rod at 18 ft. First fish was a nice little 17 inch Coho, too bad it didn't have a red throat. lol. 10 minutes later same rod pops off, and we have a 14 cutthroat in the boat, then it took about and hour and a half and same rod went off again and we got a 16 inch cutthroat. The bite seemed to just totally shut off after that third fish. All fish came at 18 feet on the lucky craft lure. It was nice to catch a few fish on the first fishing trip of the new year. There were only two other boats on the lake when we were there and they were both bass fishing.

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