The Search for Landlocked Sockeye

Sockeye are kind of the weirdo among their other salmonid brethren. It doesn't look out of place in the mix with other Pacific salmon. And it doesn't behave particularly differently either. Except from one glaring oddity. Oncorhynchus nerka eats zooplankton. Virtually every juvenile salmon and trout does, but none maintain their affinity for dining on tiny life forms quite like sockeye salmon do in their adult ocean going form. Like Atlantic salmon, sockeye can survive just fine as a landlocked population. This form of the species is called kokanee.

CT has some kokanee, in just three bodies of water. Two have good fisheries, one hopefully will in years to come but doesn't yet. Throughout most of their life cycle they are nearly impossible to catch on the fly. But when they spawn, they get snappy and may hit small streamers, San Juan Worms, and eggs. It's a short window, like all Pacific salmon sockeye are semelparous, spawning only once and dying immediately thereafter. So when I saw that kokanee were being caught last week in varying degrees of decay, I knew I wouldn't have long to attempt to add one to me life list this year. Noah and I made our plans. Hopefully we wouldn't miss them.

What we definitely didn't expect though, was snow.

The lakes that have kokanee in CT don't have any significant streams feeding them to get a spawning run of sorts, which is unfortunate because that would be really darn cool. Instead they attempt to spawn along lake shorelines that have a little bit of current and the right kind of gravel. So that's where we were going to focus out efforts. In our first spot we saw fish rise, probably trout, and I thought I saw a few red forms swimming around but couldn't be sure of it. We got cold hands and no hook ups, so we went to get some hand warmers. After a little while this spot lost it's shine and we wanted to try somewhere else. Unfortunately that somewhere else was somewhere I knew even less about.

Pheasant

That was definitely less productive in terms of finding anything that felt remotely like the right water for kokanee. I caught one perch before we gave up for more familiar fish, in hopes of just catching something remotely interesting. Another big lake, another unfamiliar kind of fishing. Trout and salmon in bigger lake is something I rarely ever do, so this was all largely experimental. We found some fish at creek mouths. Rainbows, not the big brown we were expecting and hoping for.

We decided to give our first spot one final go, one last chance at a kokanee. A few casts in I felt a pull and looked up to see a flash of deep red. Then it was gone.
So close yet so far. Till next year, kokanee.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Every little bit is appreciated! 
Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.