I made the trip up to Palmer Lake last year to fish for the kokanee, and I just had to see how it was this year. It’s good. My brother Rick and I traveled to Palmer last Saturday and enjoyed the first real day of spring fishing on the water for the year, and caught kokanee and perch, too. We arrived at the lake, which is near Loomis, not far from the Canadian Border. There were a bunch of boats on the water when we arrived. When we passed other boats they indicated that fishing was pretty slow. It took us a while to find some hungry fish, but we did. We wound up hooking eight and landing four nice kokanee, all of them 17 to 17 ½ inches. We tried Wedding Ring spinners, squid type rigs, my favorite Super Duper, all baited with white, shoepeg corn. The kokanee hit them all. We found the fish between 12 and 15 feet deep, and caught them trolling from about point 8 to 1.7 miles per hour. We had heard that there were some nice perch available at Palmer too, to we put away the kokanee gear after about four hours and went looking. We found them pretty quick and put 18 fat ones in the boat before we headed home.