The Fish Are Out There After Two Years Of Decline, Fishing At Lake Roosevelt Is Improving - If You Use The Right Technique

Lennie Mayo is not surprised the fishing for kokanee and rainbows at Lake Roosevelt has significantly picked up for the first time in two years.

“The fish have have been here,” he said. “People just didn’t know how to find them.”

Yes, fish were there, but countless fish also were missing.

A net-pen project supported by the Bonneville Power Administration, Washington Fish and Wildlife Department, Spokane Indian Tribe and many volunteers produced more than a half a million fish for the lake last year.

The effort was countered by dramatic reservoir drawdowns in the past two years, which apparently have flushed hundreds of thousands of fish over Grand Coulee Dam. An acoustic sounding study last year documented at least 800,000 fish going through the dam.

Through all the gloom, Mayo continued to catch fish for the clients he served with J.L. Fishing Guide Service out of Seven Bays.

“Three years ago, there were so many fish, anyone could catch them with little effort,” he said. “When things went sour, most anglers quit. But if you continued to put in the effort, there were still fish here.”

As he idled his boat out of the Seven Bays Marina, Mayo pointed to the two large buoys marking the entrance to the harbor.

“In April last year, those buoys weren’t floating,” he said. “They were on the ground.”

Most anglers couldn’t even launch their boats. The water was either too low in the spring or too high and full of debris in the summer for the fishing to settle down.

Water levels are more stable this year. Lake Roosevelt anglers knew that was the key to better fishing, although success rates this fall for rainbows were nothing to brag about.

In late December, however, the fishing dramatically improved.

“There weren’t many fishermen out here,” Mayo said, “but they were getting limits.”

Once word started getting out that anglers were catching rainbows up to 5 pounds plus kokanee ranging from 12-18 inches, the boats started showing up at the usual winter hot spots.

This time of year, the best kokanee fishing tends to be at the lower end of the reservoir from Grand Coulee Dam upstream to Jones Bay.

Two weekends ago, a dozen boats were trolling through Swawilla Basin, which is between Keller and Spring Canyon. Many of the anglers were taking five-fish limits, Mayo said.

A day later, the reservoir level came up and the fish followed the typical pattern of refusing to bite.

Mayo went out anyway, hitting several of his favorite spots. Between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. at Swawilla Basin, he had four kokanee on and two in the boat. Only a few of the other nine boats in the area were hooking fish.

Then the bite seemed to stop, even for Mayo.

He reeled in and went to the Sanpoil River Arm, where he caught one 18-inch coho salmon, which probably had come downstream from Lake Coeur d’Alene.

In the next few hours, the sun finally burned through the fog, the bald eagles began to fly along the lake and the weather was delightful.

But the fish wouldn’t bite.

The water temperature was under 40 degrees, and Mayo knows the best surface fishing occurs in the range of 44 to 54 degrees.

“This is an off day and we still have three nice fish,” he said. “Tomorrow might be the day we start getting limits again. Who knows? But the fish are here.”

He pointed to the spots on the sonar indicating dozens of fish below the boat.

Although Mayo can catch the reservoir’s fish any time of the year, he concentrates on the peak seasons for particular species.

January through May is prime time for catching kokanee.

In June, he switches gears to walleye and smallmouths, although he will use his downriggers for trout if clients wish.

Rainbows are his primary target in the fall.

Mayo has been fishing the big lakes of the Inland Northwest since the 1970s. He started guiding two years ago after retiring as a firefighter from Kaiser Trentwood.

The weather isn’t always pleasant this time of year, but the fishing can be exciting because the kokanee tend to be concentrated near the surface.

At some point during the day, the fish might be visible as their dorsal fins bulge above the surface while they feed.

“The trick is not to spook them,” Mayo said.

“You don’t want to circle around among them. That just moves them out. It’s better to mark the area, then troll through the fish and beyond them 300 or 400 yards before turning and going back through them again.”

Like most serious anglers who keep written records of their daily results, Mayo has found certain patterns that have produced better success rates than others.

Most of the silvers this time of year are suspended near the surface over at least 120 feet of water.

He rigs his kokanee lures so they run about four feet deep. To achieve this, he played out two colors of leaded line with lures attached to 100 feet of leader. He runs a pair of Pro-Lite dodgers for attraction.

The Seven Bays Marina is one of the few places that’s carrying the Pro-Lite attractors, even though more and more kokanee anglers are turning to them for several reasons.

The Pro-Lites are winning favor because they’re light and they wobble on edge with minimal resistance. Most important, when reeling in, they tend to plane, reducing the pull on the kokanee’s delicate mouth.

This helps avoid the downfall of a traditional dodger, which can twist near the boat and torque the hook out of a kokanee’s soft mouth.

Mayo uses line counters on his reels to run out 161 feet of line on the rods at the side of the boat. Why not 160 feet, you ask?

“I’ve had better luck with 161,” he said.

He rigs the third rod in the center to run a little deeper, where he’s more likely to catch a rainbow.

“I go out 185 feet on the center rod and add a quarter to a half-ounce of lead on the swivel above a single dodger,” he said. “I only attach 50 feet of leader to the leaded line on the center rod to keep the lure deeper,” he said.

“You can do everything right, but if you’re not in the right zone, you won’t be catching these fish.”

While fishing, he experiments with a variety of lures on the three rods, ranging from his own fly patterns and Maribou Muddlers to Wedding Ring lures, Needlefish and nightcrawlers in a worm harness.

Each hook is festooned with a maggot. Some of the hooks are baited with shoepeg corn.

His trolling speed for kokanee never varies much from 1.5 mph.

Although he thinks a rubber snubber is useful in preventing hooks from ripping out of small kokanee mouths, he doesn’t use them on Lake Roosevelt.

“With the bigger kokanee we find here, I think the snubbers can stretch, snap back and do more harm than good,” he said. “I’d rather rely on a loose drag and a flexible rod to absorb the shock.”

The biggest kokanee netted from his boat this year was 18.5 inches long - a beauty, but not up to the five-pound records that were being caught in 1994.

“These are nice fish we’re catching now, but they don’t have the football-shape they had three years ago,” he said.

“If these fish don’t get flushed, they will turn into footballs, too.”

The net-pen releases assure new life to the reservoir’s fishery. If water levels don’t go down dramatically, the food sources for the fish should replenish themselves and the fishery could prosper.

“We might only be a season away from the glory days,” Mayo said.

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