That's right, I said drop our spoons down. Being a bass fishermen at heart, I never have had the patience to troll and it drives me nuts staring at a rod in a rod holder. I have found jigging for kokanee to be easily as effective as trolling in most situations and almost always outproduces trolling when the fish are schooled up tight.

I didn't even have my spoon to the bottom when Don said he had a strike. A couple seconds later he was into the first fish of the day. The fish was putting up a fairly decent fight and we were pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be a 12 inch kokanee. I repositioned the boat over the school of fish, we dropped our spoons down and Don hit another fish right off the bat. This one was smaller, only 8 inches, so he released it to fight another day.

I was fishing a 1/2 ounce Crippled Herring in chrome and blue and Don was fishing a 1/2 ounce white and chartreuse Crippled Herring. Since he had hit the first two fish, I decided to switch over to something brighter and put on a firetiger pattern. The color change paid off as I hit the next fish of the morning, a decent-sized kokanee around 11 inches. Over the next two hours, we managed to hook around a dozen fish, keeping a few for the frying pan and the releasing all of the fish that weren't hooked too badly. We also caught and released three small mackinaw up to 13 inches.

By 9:00 am, the schools had disappeared and it looked like our morning was just about over. I decided to head over the protected waters of the north west corner of the lake. Several years ago, we regularly found good concentrations of fish here, but during the last couple of years, they were nowhere to be found. As we followed the buoy line of the public beach swimming area moving in and out from 50 to 90 feet of water, the bottom 30 feet of the graph suddenly turned black with a huge school of fish. We were in 85 feet of water, so I knew they had to be kokanee. "Drop it down to the bottom and reel it up a few cranks," I shouted. "There's fish everywhere."

We quickly let our spoons out and neither one of us made it to the bottom. My spoon was hit about 50 feet down and Don's stopped short at about 60 feet. We had our first double hook-up of the day. Both fish were decent quality, close to 12 inches, and we decided to keep them and fill out our 5 fish limits. We stayed on top of that school for the next hour and had some of the most wide open kokanee fishing imaginable. We had at least 30 hook-ups, including 6 double hook-ups, and landed another 20 fish ranging from 8 to 12 inches.

At 10:15 am, the boat traffic was getting heavy and we decided to call it a day. We had 10 fat kokanee to bring back to the cabin for breakfast and memories of another red hot fourth of July kokanee trip at Donner Lake. If you're thinking of giving it a try, the kokanee should stay schooled up for at least another month and limits should be the rule as long as the weather cooperates.