This is the time of year that James Lebow and I try Billy Clapp for kokanee. In past years we have had pretty good success, catching fish that average over 15 inches. We made a couple of laps in the areas of the lake that have produced for us on previous trips and didn’t get a bite. We trolled our tried and true combinations of Kokabow blades and spinners until we gave up trying for kokanee. Maybe our luck will change later in the month. We’ll see. We decided to switch to trolling for trout with our favorite plugs and still couldn’t buy a strike. I was desperate to catch something for making the trip to Billy Clapp, so I trolled our lures close to the face of the dam. I put on a large Bandit plug that I had used at Banks for walleye that James thought was ridiculous, but it caught walleye. Wouldn’t you know it, that it was the plug that got a smallmouth bass. We got another small fish on one of his plugs, and narrowly missed getting skunked! We talked to some other anglers, and no one got a darn thing on Billy Clapp that day.