A Kokanee Catchfest

Some veteran kokanee anglers believe that the kokanee fishing at Loon Lake this year is the best it has ever been.

To Don Ostlund, who fishes for the landlocked salmon at Loon at least 100 days every summer, it’s the best fishing he’s ever experienced.

He thinks there are hundreds of thousands of adult kokanee in the popular lake 35 miles north of Spokane. The kokanee population is huge as the result of the release of large numbers of hatchery-raised fish and natural spawning. The Fish and Wildlife Department has been stocking Loon with 155,000 to 160,000 kokanee fry the last few years.

Both trollers and anglers who still-fish at night have been limiting the last three months. Still-fishing has been the fastest way to catch 10 kokanee, but trolling also has been rewarding.

When I showed up at Ostlund’s house trailer at Loon about 8, Inland Northwest residents were sweltering in near-90 degree weather. Big boats were still churning up the lake as they pulled water skiers. Although the temperature was dropping, it was still in the 80s.

Bob Welsh, formerly of Spokane and now living in the Seattle area, joined us in a few minutes. We carried graphite rods, buckets and jackets to Ostlund’s 16-foot, flat-bottomed boat. We took the jackets because we knew the temperature would drop fast after the sun set. We then motored out to a spot in front of the Granite Point Resort.

Ostlund, who has one of those old-fashioned sonar units, studied the screen while maneuvering the boat over 31- to 32-foot-deep spots. He didn’t maneuver long before spotting kokanee on the screen.

Welsh, sitting in the back of the boat, dropped a 20-pound anchor. Ostlund, in the rear, backed the boat up as Welsh let out line and then lowered another 20-pound anchor and tied it off. Like all veteran still-fishers, Ostlund considers fore and aft anchors necessary to keep a boat from swinging around.

By 8:30, after baiting our No. 6 glow hooks with several maggots, we dropped our terminal rigs to the bottom. The rigs consisted of quarter-ounce, in-line sinkers 11 to 12 inches above the hooks. Welsh and I turned our spinning reel handles one turn to set the hooks about 6 inches off the bottom.

Ostlund likes to hand-line the kokanee he hooks. Once he establishes the depth of his bait, he doesn’t reel in the 15-pound monofilament line. He hand-lines the kokanee, removes the fish and is then ready to cast the bait, knowing the baited hook will be about 6 inches off the bottom.

The sun was setting as we started to fish. The horizon turned a yellowish orange. The last of the water skiers left the lake. The water, which had been made choppy by water skiers’ boats, flattened.

Within 2 or 3 minutes, I detected a change in the tension of my line and set the hook. Thirty seconds later, I swung a 12-inch kokanee over the boat side.

As anglers who fish for kokanee know, the fish, unlike trout and spiny-rayed fish, don’t grab a baited hook and run, causing the rod tip to jerk down. Kokanee mouth a bait. Its take is almost always subtle, so many anglers never realize that a kokanee has picked up their bait.

Raising and lowering the rod tip and moving the tip back and forth increases an angler’s chances of detecting the delicate mouthings. In fact, most of the kokanee I caught mouthed the bait while I was slowly raising my rod tip. I felt only a slight tightening of my line.

Welsh caught a 13-inch kokanee within minutes after I swung my first fish over the boat side. Not long thereafter, Ostlund began hand-lining a kokanee.

As nearly always happens when the fishing is good, Ostlund began swinging kokanee over the side of his boat every minute or so. Within 30 minutes after we started fishing, he unhooked his 10th kokanee.

“I’m done,” he said. He then set his rod down and waited for Welsh and me to get our limits.

He would have caught his limit in less than 30 minutes if a kokanee he was trying to unhook hadn’t, during its frantic wiggles, thrown the hook, which then penetrated a finger. The barb was deep in the flesh.

None of us had needle-nose pliers so that Ostlund could push the hook through the flesh, crush the barb and then back the hook out of his thumb. Ostlund used standard pliers to pull the hook out. His thumb bled profusely, but he kept fishing until he had caught 10 kokanee.

It took another 15 minutes for Welsh and me to catch our limits. By 9:15, we had 30 kokanee in the boat.

When Oslund told Joe Haley, manager of the Granite Point Resort, that we had caught 30 kokanee in less than 45 minutes, he said: “That was slow fishing. You should have told Roskelley to come up here when the fishing is good.”

Maybe he was exaggerating a bit. But I’ve never known the fishing to be as good as the evening when I caught 10 kokanee in 40 minutes.