Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
When the kokanee bite is on, the people will come.
And it’s been on this summer.
“It’s been great,” said Jack Legg Jr., owner of Dan-Dee Sales in Sweet Home, the closest thing to a clearinghouse for fishing information in town. “There’s been lot of people going kokanee fishing. The word’s been out. They’ve been running 14-inch fish versus 8 to 9-inch fish.”
Fishing for the landlocked sockeye salmon has cooled off with the cooler weather in the last week, but Legg said before that a lot of fishermen he’s heard from were catching limits of 25 fish. He said last week he was hearing about catches of 10 to 15 fish.
Sheila Gelissen, of Salem, was fishing Aug. 17 off the upper bridge at Green Peter.
“Today’s been a little bit slow,” she said, glancing up at the cloudy skies, which kept things cool. “Sunny days seem to be a lot better.”
A fellow angler on the bridge, she said, had caught 16 in one outing the previous week and had hooked another 12 on Aug. 16, all of them in the 16-inch range.
“They’re biting real, real soft,” she said.
There’s a lot of comeradry up here,” she said. You see a lot of the same people.
Robert L. Lopez, of Lebanon, said he’s had pretty good success off the bridge as well.
“We spent five days up here a few weeks ago,” he said as he reeled in on Aug. 17. “We were catching fish every day ? mostly kokanee.”
Lopez told how, three weeks ago, he’d caught an 8- to 10-inch kokanee and “I had three bass follow him up. I let them fight over him and one swallowed him, but the line broke when I was reeling him in.”
Bob Dearborn, of Lebanon, a former Sweet Home resident, had eight kokanee in his boat as he and his son
Kyle, 10, rolled out of the water at Thistle Creek Boat Launch Friday afternoon, Aug. 19.
Dearborn said anglers in the boat next to him on the lake were using purple jigs and “the fish were just slamming.
“Everybody in that boat caught about 15 each,” he said.
Anglers said the fish seem to be biting between 50 and 65 feet, mostly on corn, jigs and spinners.
Legg, whose shop produces kokanee spinners, said he has “about nine new colors of spinners” he plans to try out in the near future.
“We’re testing them out, then we will make them and sell them. We make colors you don’t find anywhere,” he said.
“We’ve been selling a lot of that stuff this year.”