sawtooth
IDAHO Kokanee Forum Moderator
More fish, less Virus in 2021.
Two of us fished Ririe from around 9:30 to 5:30. We started near the dam and trolled 2 flat lines and two DR lines at around 20 feet. We did not mark any fish and did not get any bites, so we started working our way upstream. We started marking fish near the floating outhouse, suspended at 30-40 feet, so we dropped the balls and started catching fish. We did best between 35 and 45 feet. Best approach seemed to be to stack the lines at 35 and 45 feet. No luck on flashers. They seemed to prefer a sling blade dodger. Dodger color did not seem to matter. Most hits were on orange hoochies, but we also got a few on pink. Gold and orange needle fish also worked. Action came in spurts. We would troll for a while and get nothing, then we would get one right after another. We even had three on at one time. Total for the day was 7 fish in the boat, and we lost at least that many at the boat. I think it may be time to replace the hooks on some of our favorite lures. Sharp hooks seem to grab better. Fish were all 12-14 inches, nice fish for Ririe. I hope they put on another inch or two before the spawn.
Water temp was 50-52 F, so I thought we would catch a few fish on the flatlines. We tried no weight and out to 100 feet with 1 oz. We never got a strike near the top.
Always fun to keep trying until you figure out what works.
Hopefully we can figure them out next time. That is the challenge. laugh hystThanks for the report. Looks like you are figuring them out!
Three of us fished Ririe today. Ended up with 18 in the boat. All but 2 were 13-14". We lost a couple of nice ones at the boat. Dodgers and hoochies seemed to work best. We caught some on orange, but also caught some on other colors. There did not seem to be a strong preference for one color. They did seem to like krill and anise scent. All fish were caught between 30 and 40 feet. We caught fish from Juniper ramp to above the floating outhouse. They seemed most active from around 9:30 am to around noon. Then it slowed down until around 3:00 pm when it started to pick back up. We quit a little after 5 pm.
Smelly Jelly special Shrimp Anise has always been my only scent needed for Ririe! It slays Kokes.
Four of us decided to try our luck at Ririe on the 9th from 9:00 to 3:00. It was too windy to fish the open water near the dam most of the day. We fished around the Floating outhouse where it is more sheltered. Even there it was challenging to maintain a course and several times we had to really goose the engine to keep from blowing up on the shore. We ended up with 10 kokanee and 3 rainbows. Most of the kokanee were around 12 inches. One went around 14 inches and 2 that were less than 10 inches were released. We lost several at the boat. We started out around 25-35 feet deep and dropped to 35-40 feet as the day progressed. No one color seemed to produce consistent action, so we kept changing and never found the hot ticket. There was one bright side to the wind, there were no water skiers or jet skis. tooexcited