Kokanee (& Trout) In The Dark

As an obsessive nighttime angler, I'm constantly looking to d to my repertoire. One thing I've done very little of is target trout in stillwaters at night. Here in CT, many of our stillwater fisheries are composed of stocked trout with very poor holdover rates, so that makes them generally uninteresting to me. There are some lakes with a half decent holdover rate but most take some travel. There's also some lakes with other species of interest. It was kokanee that got me fairly intrigued to try one particular stillwater.

Kokanee are landlocked sockeye salmon. They were brought top CT in the 1940's to build a recreational fishery. Why the state of CT is expending resources on this only lightly fished species that isn't native is beyond me, but at least kokanee aren't going to spread far and wide. In fact, landloacked alewives, also a non-native, have almost completely wiped out kokanee fisheries in Ct in the past. Kokanee have an affinity for nocturnal activity, though kokanee feeding is focused on zooplankton. They're essentially a salmonid that filter feeds... not quite like menhaden or American shad, but they focus on such tiny food items when foraging. Transferring their nocturnal feeding habits over to the spawning run- when the strike mainly out of aggression -doesn't necessarily follow. But at least in my mind, nocturnal is nocturnal and I should be able to get some to strike. If not, rainbows would be around the same areas. 

I set out on a brightly moonlit night with a plan in mind. I'd fish two methods, both with relatively small and bright colored flies as that's what has worked for kokanee in the past. I'd start out fishing them under indicators. With the aid of the moon, as well as nearby artificial light, I'd be able to see the indicator drop if I was getting takes. If that failed, I'd slow pull the same flies as well as some streamers with a figure eight retrieve

Upon arrival to the spot, I could actually see the schools of fish. There were huge numbers of kokanee out there, as well as loads of trout. It soon proved very easy to get the trout to take. Me indicator dropped time and time again.

The trout seemed to have very little preference in the way of flies. I caught them on Green Weenies, eggs, Walt's Worm with pink collar, Sawyer's Pheasant Tail, and small buggers. I kept switching mostly to try to pull out a kokanee, but it wasn't proving to be especially easy. Even on the best of days they test a good angler's resolve. Each Pacific salmon has a different attitude during their spawning run., and it differs place to place as well. Kings in New York are heavily pressured and often hard to convince to snap at something, which is why many anglers fish eggs, bits of foam, and smaller flies with immense amounts of weight. This differs from large and less pressured river chinooks in Alaska, which are caught on large flies and lures. It also differs from less pressured water elsewhere in the great lakes. Coho, wherever they are, seem to be on the aggressive side of the spectrum, as do pinks. Chum salmon are definitely quite inclined to take large streamers and lures. Kokanee seem to be one of the finickiest. This results in a lot of people intentionally snagging them, which is just ridiculous. Its also illegal, and I call the TIP hotline any time I see it happening. As should you. Anglers often complain about poachers in CT, and yes ENCON is understaffed and won't always respond, but you should still call. The more calls get made the more poachers will get caught. Please do your part. 

I, of course, was just patiently waiting for a kokanee to actually grab a fly. It took a couple hours before one finally did, but it was a wonderful proof of concept. I could, in fact, catch a kokanee at night. The first one sunk the indicator just like the trout had been doing. The fly of choice? The good old Green Weenie.

That wasn't really the start of a pattern though. Kokanee are moody and erratic, and I often get them seemingly at random. Indeed I ended up with three that night in five hours of fishing, and each was on a different fly. The first was the only one to take under the indicator. The second took on a slow retrieve and the third took and egg on the fall. 

I lost a couple couple kokanee that I clearly saw as well, and a few that may have been. largely though the night was a very trouty one. I must have caught between 35 and 40 of them, and I even specifically tried to avoid them at times in hopes of picking up more salmon. As it turns out, that nighttime indicator strategy in particular is wildly effective. I've considered fishing indicators at night in rivers as well and this really did some convincing. I've lightly fiddled with the idea in the past, putting glow in the dark tape on indicators, but it never really got me anywhere I think its time to in some glowing thingamabobbers. 

The night game is such a fascinating one. I've always felt that it builds on an anglers understanding of the water they're fishing. If the right casts and presentations can be made or even things as simple as getting to the productive locations can be accomplished without aid of the light of day, it builds your understanding of the water. But something I sometimes forget, and likely equally important: fish behave differently at night. Fishing in the dark builds your understanding of your query as well. I feel I have a better understanding of landloacked sockeye now having caught them at night. 

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Franky, Geof, Luke, Noah, Justin, Sean, Tom, Mark, Jake, and Chris for making Connecticut Fly Angler possible. If you want to support this blog, look for the Patreon link at the top of the right side-bar in web version.

CT Kokanee on the Fly

Noah and I are running out of local lifers, especially large local lifers. Especially in freshwater where we really had only a handful of micros and endangered species (which we don't target, for obvious reasons). The only freshwater "gamefish" I had left to catch in CT were tiger musky and kokanee, Noah only had kokanee since hasn't counted hybrids. We had to get kokanee this year. Last year we tried one time. It was too late, too cold, too windy, too snowy, on and on and on. It was just an extremely poor fishing day. Our only day targeting kokanee this year was the polar opposite, an absolutely lovely fall day to be up in the Northwestern CT hills. Now, I guess I should give some background for those of you that don't know what a kokanee is. Kokanee are the landlocked for of sockeye salmon, having naturally diverged roughly 15,000 years ago when melting glaciers facilitated their geographic isolation from sea run sockeye. Sockeye are a strange salmonid, continuing to feed on zooplankton almost exclusively through their entire lives. As such they don't rise to hatches or feed on baitfish, and the fishing methods used to catch kokanee outside of spawning season can be quite unique. Like their other Pacific salmon brethren though, they let their guard down during the spawning run and can be aggravated into striking flies and lures. Also like Pacific salmon, when they start the spawning process, that's the beginning of their end. They die after they spawn. CT DEEP maintains a small number of stillwater kokanee fisheries through capturing adults before they spawn then stocking the offspring back into those bodies of water. They likely wouldn't produce a wild fishery on their own, but it is interesting to have these fish available to us. 

 Noah and I wanted to time our trip to coincide with the spawn, preferably fairly early when the fish are the most fired up and easily triggered into striking. I started to get a little nervous when we circumnavigated the lake and saw only two carcasses that had been there a while. It wasn't until we got all the way around the lake and back to where we'd started that we found a bunch of kokanee. Noah hooked and boated one one his first cast into the school, of course it flipped right out of the kayak and we then both struggled for a long time to land one. Getting them to strike wasn't actually that difficult. Changing tactic frequently and just sticking to it got results. The fish would seemingly ignore a presentation for a long time before suddenly slamming it, or just progressively get visibly more and more irritated before snapping. We both got tons of takes, but a combination of factors including the small size of the fish, their jumping, and their tooth filled narrow mouths made them very hard to hook and keep hooked. Almost no takes resulted in hooked fish, and most of the fish we hooked threw the lure or fly. To make things even more frustrating, the fish were grouped tightly and moving about, so they often snagged themselves. I stuck mostly with barbless hooks so I could shake off snagged fish. Evidently people are going specifically to snag these fish. While we were there a man came along, snagged the biggest female there, and then kept it. Snagging is obviously low, but keeping a rotting, spawning salmon is just stupid. Someone also pulled up next to us and asked "snaggin anything?". People either aren't patient enough or just don't know that these fish will mouth the right presentations. Or they don't care, and that's honestly probably the case. Noah and I could have snagged every kokanee in this place twice pretty easily and then taken tons of photos to share all over social media. But what really would the point of that be?
No, we were struggling to catch any at all, but if I was going to catch a kokanee it had to eat the fly.

And lucky for me one did, I hooked it, it stayed on through a couple of jumps, and it didn't shake the hook until I had it in shallow water where I could keep it from making a break for it. I edged on step closer to my goal of reaching #150 before the end of 2019.

Lifelist fish #142, sockeye salmon (kokanee salmon), Oncorhynchus nerka, Rank: species

Noah eventually got one too, and we soon left those obnoxious little demons to their business. Honestly, I'll need an entire year to forget how frustrating they were to want to go try to catch one again. I'd love to try to get them in a river, that seems like a lot more fun, but I'm fairly certain that closest that kind of fishery exists in Colorado.
So, now I'm down to a dismally low number of local species I still need to catch. This is getting hard. Time to move!
Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, Chris, Brandon, and Christopher, for supporting this blog on Patreon.

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.

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Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.