The opening day of the sockeye season on Lake Wenatchee was one of the best ever as far as I could tell. I saw nets out everywhere all morning. I think there were just over 100 boats out, scattered from the top end of the lake down as far as I could see. Tom Verschuren and I got everything sorted out and got to fishing at about 5:30 and we had our eight fish by 7:30. We lost a bunch and missed a ton of hits and finished with our second double. I had two rods out with three bare red hooks on one side of the boat and on the other had two rods with hoochies. We couldn’t see that it made any difference on the number of fish or the number of fish hooked and landed. This was Tom’s first time sockeye fishing, and he really had a blast. I stopped at Tumwater dam to see if they had an update, and the board said that 73,164 sockeye had passed over the dam and they were missing four day of counts from the previous week. No wonder the fishing was so good!
There were lots of nice sockeye filling coolers on the opening day on Thursday.