There’s a new fish in town

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, January 21, 2006

Fishing? Lake Stevens? Just say “kokanee,” and “purple pennant,” and you have it all wrapped up. Couple of months, max, of good fishing for the handful of guys who know how to do it, and that’s pretty much all she wrote. Turn ‘er over to the jet skis, boys, and wait ‘til next year.

Oh sure, there’s some bass fishing around the edges that can be pretty decent from time to time, and a fair population of yellow perch that shows up in the heat of summer. Face it, however the fishery for landlocked sockeye, running from mid-May into August has long been the big lake’s only real claim to angling fame.

But whoa! There’s a new kid on the block. Triploid rainbow trout so big you can’t fit ‘em into the kitchen sink. Fish which, given a few more years, will be pushing 10, 12 pounds or more, and will be so much fun to pursue that they’ll wean even a few of the oldtimers away from kokanee. The trout are already insinuating themselves among the local populace, as bait fishermen on a dozen Lake Stevens docks tangle regularly this winter with prime, fat, rose-tinted, tackle-wrecking ‘bows pulling the scales to 5 pounds and better.

The new fishery has passed muster with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, but it’s really the project of a knowledgeable couple who looked at Lake Stevens and decided it should be producing a lot more fishing-oriented recreation than it was doing. Jim and Laurie Goerg own The Reel News, a statewide sportfishing newspaper, and are relatively recent residents of Lake Stevens. They found they liked the area and the folks so well that they decided to put something back into the community.

Thus CTEP Cooperative Trout Enhancement Program was formed among a handful of tackle manufacturers, dealers, clubs and other like-minded entities, to raise funds, purchase trout from a commercial hatchery operation, and plant them in Lake Stevens, available to all.

The first plant was in early May of last year, about 10,000 triploid ‘bows going 9 to 12 inches.

“We purchased fingerlings,” Goerg said, “But the supplier had a last-minute cancellation and he offered us the larger fish, at the fingerling price. What a deal.”

Those trout should be a pound and a half to two pounds this spring, Goerg said.

The second plant was in late November, composed of about 500 trips in the 4- to 5-pound range, to sort of give the sport fishery a kick start. It apparently did.

“I can’t keep enough worms in stock,” said tackle shop owner Greg Rockenbach in Lake Stevens (Greg’s Custom Fishing Rods). “The guys are using some Power Bait, but a worm hung 6 feet or so under a bobber seems to be the preferred setup.”

Winter is a great time to chase Lake Stevens’ new rainbow population, Rockenbach said. Nothing else is really available, for one thing, and the lake’s notorious crowd of water skiers/wakeboarders/jet skiers is off doing whatever it is they do in the winter, bless ‘em.

The fish are widely scattered throughout the lake by now, Rockenbach said, and both boat and dock fishermen are scoring. Dock anglers, using the above-mentioned setup, can find public access at Wyatt Park on the lake’s west shoreline (at the intersection of Davies and Chapel Hill roads); at the state access area in the old downtown business core (at the end of 17th Place); at a pier roughly 100 yards north of the state access (where the old police station is located; has a covered structure in case it’s, ha ha, raining); and at Sunset Park, on the east side of the lake, south of the business district, near the purple pennant area.

Boat fishermen looking for hunky rainbow are trolling a number of different setups, Rockenbach said, with the most popular a Wedding Ring spinner tipped with a piece of worm. Another very productive technique is to pull a bead-head woolly bugger, number 8 or so, on mono or sink-tip fly gear, very slowly, making S-turns. Remember that the fish are spread out, Rockenbach said, so it’s a good idea to keep moving and covering different water.

During the colder months, rainbow seem to hang closer to the shallower parts of the lake, along the edges, in the coves and off the points, and Rockenbach said they’re generally found closer to the surface rather than deeper. One of the most popular fishing areas is off the second point south of town, called by everyone the “purple pennant.” It might be because fish really congregate there, or simply because it’s an area familiar to almost everybody, and so it draws anglers. Yes, there’s a Purple Pennant Road in the area, but you’ll have to talk to a real oldtimer to find out why both the road and the point in general bear that strange name.

Other good rainbow trolling areas include the point west of the WDFW access, on the north bank, where the narrow arm called by locals “the cove” meets the lake proper; and around the “bump” on the north side of the lake. Paved launches include the free (with access sticker) WDFW facility in town, and the fee ramp at Wyatt Park.

Rockenbach said a 5 -pounder is the largest he has weighed so far this winter, but he had a reasonably reliable report of a 7-pounder. Really nice trout, he said. Silvery, bright, not beat up in the least.

“They’ve generated a huge amount of interest the last couple of months,” he said, “and I think it’s just a matter of giving ‘em something to catch and then standing back so you don’t get run over.”

The popular spring/early summer kokanee fishery is almost exclusively a boat show, off the purple pennant, out in mid-lake around the aerator, and a couple of other places, depending on time of year. The fish run 10 to 17 or 18 inches, Rockenbach said, with quite a few fat, football-shaped specimens in the 14-inch range, and they’ve been touted for years as tops on the table.

Oldtimers have grown up with leaded line, 4 or 5 colors early, and more than that when the kokes go deeper later in the year (Rockenbach said customers have reported fish down to 100 feet, out around the aerator, where the lake is 155-feet deep). The more recent trend, however, is toward one of the small, clamp-on downriggers with a 4- or 5-pound ball, Rockenbach said, after about mid-June. Early-season kokanee are found at 10 feet or so in only 30 or 40 feet of water, moving outward and deeper as the lake warms.

Kokanee fishermen using leaded line go with up to 50 feet of 8-pound mono leader, then both they and those using downriggers troll a small, 4-inch flasher (Luhr Jensen or the Slingblade by Shasta Tackle), followed by a Dick Nite or Little Shaver spoon, red/silver or red/white, or a Wedding Ring (red or pink beads) with a number 6 hook tipped with white corn and soaked in scent.

“Pautzke’s is coming out this year with bait corn already in scent, in a jar,” Rockenbach said. “I’ll be interested in seeing how it works.”

Use either a long, limber rod, Rockenbach said, or a rubber snubber in front of your dodger, since kokanee tend to be soft-mouthed. For the same reason, carry a long-handled net so your fish aren’t lost in a flurry at the boat.

Goerg invites anglers interested in the Lake Stevens fishery to visit the CTEP booth at next month’s Monroe outdoor show, and he hopes they might be persuaded to donate a few bucks toward continuing the triploid plants. Or, they can send a completely tax-deductible donation made out to CTEP, to Jim Goerg, 621 State Route 9 N.E., #A-16, Lake Stevens, WA 98258.