Silvers, day or night
Kokanee are the region’s icon for brightness, not just because of their color, but also because these landlocked sockeye salmon are known for eating quality that can brighten anyone’s day.
Most anglers troll for kokanee, also known as bluebacks or silvers. The fishing can be good in May with the fish near the surface, but the fish get bigger as the summer progresses until they start to congregate in spawning areas in the fall.
By summer, some anglers prefer to go out at night to search for schools of kokanee.
By starting around 9 p.m., anglers can beat the heat and avoid the water skiers. And while the basic techniques can be used at most kokanee waters, night fishers have found particularly good success at Loon Lake, a 1,119-acre lake north of Spokane.
For starters, query anglers to find the approximate depth where kokanee have been holding. At Loon, anglers often set out quietly, trolling along the shoreline, zigzagging over depths ranging from 25-35 feet.
Some anglers prefer to drop a marker buoy when they’ve found a school on their sonar and then they anchor and start jigging.
If fish are marked at 30 feet, carefully drop one boat anchor in 20 feet of water. Move quietly past the marker buoy and drop a second anchor from the other end of the boat at 40 feet.
Several rigs will work. Try an ultralight spinning rod, 5-6 1/2 feet long, spooled with 6-pound-test line. Tie 9 to 14 inches of leader from an inline sinker and attach a Glo Hook.
Experiment in the boat to see how many inches of line your reel retrieves per turn in order to bring the hook up off the bottom. The test is necessary, since reel-retrieve ratios differ.
Charge the Glo Hook with a photo strobe, bait the hook with corn or a grub and drop the in-line sinker rig directly down until the sinker touches bottom. Reel up enough to bring the hook 2-10 inches off the bottom.
Jig very slowly in a slight side-to-side motion. A wire bite indicator attached to the tip of the rod helps anglers detect a kokanee’s delicate nibble.