PETER HOPE LAKE

I headed straight to the south end of the lake and began trolling my gear at 40 and 45 feet.

Today's starting line up was slim swing tail dodgers, one paired with a chartreuse wiggle hoochie and the other with a gold wiggle hoochie. The fish were marking fairly consistently between 30 to 60 feet deep. It took about 30 minutes to get my first kokanee on the line, using the gold wiggle hoochie. Shortly after this, I lost another one, also on the gold. 

This seemed like a good indication that I should switch out the chartreuse wiggle hoochie. I didn't put a gold one on because I wanted to see if I could find a lure that would work even better. Instead, I went for an orange micro spinner hoochie, followed by a pink and purple micro smile hoochie and then a pink wiggle hoochie. I had one bite on the pink and purple but nothing on the others.

Meanwhile, the gold wiggle hoochie remained popular, catching one more kokanee and losing three others. ​I finally decided to double up on the gold wiggle hoochie and run one on both rods.

I was thinking the action would pick up from here but there was a sudden lull in the action, with 45 minutes elapsing without a bite. I started trolling back towards the north end and about halfway down the lake I changed out one of the gold hoochies to a lure I have never tried before: a silver wiggle hoochie with a single strip of blue and a single stripe of pink.

It only took about 5 minutes with the new lure before kokanee number three was landed. I was about to put my line back down when I noticed that the gold wiggle hoochie finally got hit again, but I lost that one. When I got to the northwest corner of the lake I started marking a few more fish. I was actually about to head in without my limit but the silver wiggle hoochie had other plans. Within just 15 minutes of trolling in the northwest corner at 40 feet down I lost two kokanee (one very nice one by the boat) and caught my two limit fish, all on the silver wiggle hoochie!  Most of the bites came at about 40 to 45 feet deep and my trolling speed varied from 1.0 to 1.4 MPH.