While conducting seminars at The Great Northwest Outdoor Expo, I met Kory Richardson, the owner of Lucky Tackle Co. Of course, you know what happens when two gung-ho fishermen get together! We were soon lining up a fishing trip. Gee, I’ve had seminars, hunting and fishing trips nonstop since the expo, so it took us over a month to finally be able to nail down a date.
I met him before daylight, threw my gear in his truck and off we went. I love fishing and hunting with someone who is passionate about what they pursue. Even on a tough day, you learn so much from them. On the drive, he caught me up on the basics. It may sound strange, but I’ve never gotten to fish for kokanee salmon, so it was a whole new world for me. As stated above, Kory is very knowledgeable, so much so that he owns a kokanee lure company. Someday soon, I want to interview him. I’ll pick his brain and we’ll all learn from that article.
If you’re a salmon fisherman, then you know that there are five kinds of Pacific salmon, and they all have two names.
- Chinook: Kings
- Silvers: Cohos
- Dog salmon: Chum
- Sockeye: Reds
- Pink: Humpies
To my understanding, there are three lakes in Idaho where you can fish for kokanee: Deadwood Reservoir, Arrow Rock and Anderson Ranch. A kokanee is a land-locked sockeye. The sockeye is the most desired eating fish to a lot of people.
We arrived at the lake, and it was a beautiful day. Wow, we’re lucky to live in Idaho. With the spring rains, we’re having an exceptionally green summer, so things were green on the drive up, and then of course how can you not love fishing in the mountains? The scenery was beautiful.
If you’ve never trolled for kokanee, the tackle is unique. First, Kory tied on an attractant spinner, which looks like a big spoon and is called a dodger.
Then he tied a leader to the dodger with one of his flies on the end. Kokanee feed on plankton, so they don’t hit your fly because they’re eating — they hit because they’re mad at it.
One thing that Kory is fanatic about is his scent. After fishing with him, I want to experiment in all aspects of my fishing adventures. He uses rubber gloves when he is handling his flies or hooking on bait. He swears by how important it is to keep bad scents off your flies. Think about it. How can a Chinook know which river to turn up while heading back to their birthplace? The experts say by the scents of the minerals out of the rivers.
I’ve only the last few years started using bait on my crappie jigs, and it helps for sure. This year, I’ve started using Pautzke Crappie Fireballs. I may experiment on controlling and using scents on all of my fishing adventures. What about flies even in the backcountry? Soon I’m jumping on a plane to the historic Plummer’s Lodge in The Northwest Territories. I think I’ll pack a bottle of Pautzke’s Crappie Fire Balls. It will be interesting to test.
The next thing that hit me as weird was how flimsy of rods Kory used. They were as light weight and flimsy as crappie rods. He explained that they have super soft mouths so don’t horse them like you do a bass and sure don’t set the hook. He said the best method is to just lift the rod tip and start reeling, just like you do on crappie of you’ll rip the hook out.
He uses down riggers to get down deeper in the water column. Of course to find where they were, we had all of the lines at varying depths. There is so much more to cover, but we are about out of room. We’ll get in deeper detail when I do an interview with Kory.
Not long after starting, we had a big hit. We thought we had a lunker, and we did. A lunker pikeminnow, that is. We hit it hard, but it was a tough day. We only ended up netting one. But hey, that’s fishing. It happens sometimes.
In case you wonder why I am making such a big deal about kokanee fishing, it’s only because you haven’t eaten one. Brine them for three to five hours and smoke them on a plank. Your wife will be kicking you off the couch and telling you to go get her more kokanees. Or you may be lucky like Kory. He assured me that his girlfriend Janelle would be claiming the reason that we hadn’t caught more was because she wasn’t with us!
Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana.
