Yesterday I contacted Russ Elgin of Elgin Fishing to let him know I was thinking about trying for some Kokanee today on Stevens, he replied with "Why don't we go to Sammamish and try for some Cutthroat?" We got a little bit of a late start this morning, fog, traffic etc., but finally arrived at the lake around 9:30 or so and were fishing by 10. Before we headed out we saw Quadfather had just posted a report on Sammamish, so we took the advice he had given and schooled up some on what FastAction Guide Service (Paul Lewis) has written about winter time Sammamish fishing. We found what we were looking for, birds gathered in a specific area, and a few midges buzzing around. Set our lines down and got down to business.

Business wound up being no bites for a period of time. We were checking out the top 15 feet of the water column and coming up blank. Then, on a whim I dropped my line down to 25 feet, and no more than 30 seconds later, fish on! A very short time later Russ gets a fish on after dropping to about 25 feet. Just as his fish gets on the line, I get a takedown, we've got a double! Action would be like this the rest of the day. We would get bit a few times, then have to move. As a post stated from earlier in the week, the fish are a bit scattered. They are biting, you just need to go into search mode a bit. It was get a couple, then move.

In the end we landed 13 fish, kept 8 between us, and released the rest. I did land a small 10 inch or so baby Chinook that was released on a prototype God's Tooth Spoon Russ had given me prior to Coho season to mess around with. Spoon is a dark purple with pink spots. I was pulling the spoon trailing a micro gang troll. We messed around quite a bit trying out different God's Tooth set ups throughout the day. The hot patterns and set up in the end wound up being a 50/50 brass/nickel Elgin Fishing God's Tooth Spoon rigged up Kokanee style (Elgin Fishing has a tutorial on the website on how to rig the spoons up for Kokanee) pulled behind a moon jelly Yakima Bait FST dodger, and Russ had the most success with a prototype God's Tooth in Red/White stripe (due out in 2018) ran on slow action. Other patterns also caught fish, such as the 50/50 brass/nickel ran on fast action, and there may have been a few more. So many different patterns and different ways to set up these spoons. Fun experimenting and finding different combos that work.

Long trip for me, but a fun day all the same. I don't know how you folks that live in the Seattle Metro area keep your sanity with that traffic. Took me over 3 hours to get home!

Video shows most of the action from today.

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