Camp and Catch Sockeye Fishing at Baker Lake

Baker Lake has got to be one of the most stunningly beautiful places in the world to fish. Last year I tried my luck during the summer sockeye season, but came up empty. I realized that to fish there you really need to be on the water at the crack of dawn, and to do that you really need to camp there. One of the campsites, Swift Creek, has a 20-slip boat dock, which would allow us to have the boat primed and ready the night before. A few months ago I had invited my friend Dave to join me on a trip, and he booked a campsite for us there.

I left work on Wednesday evening feeling stressed. I was running late, and Dave was already there waiting for me. He and I are both former scoutmasters who haven’t camped in a while. He had graciously taken on the responsibility for setting up camp, including the meals, while I was responsible for getting the boat ready for the trip. That afternoon he had driven seven miles to find a cell phone signal to tell me that all the boat slips were full. This would significantly complicate our plans of an early start.

Soon after turning off Highway 20 onto Baker Lake Road, I was plunged into wilderness that would leave me offline for the next two days. The thick uninterrupted forest hid the fact that I was literally right at the foot of Mount Baker, except for a few tantalizing glimpses. When I finally arrived at the campground, I found Dave running down the hill. A couple of slips had just come available, and we hurried to launch the boat. With our slip safely claimed, I began to relax. He’s a great cook, and he grilled up some delicious fajitas for a late dinner before turning in to our tent. Except for one distant toddler meltdown, it was an amazingly quiet night at camp.

I was awakened to the sound of boat engines on the water and trucks towing more boats down the driveway. It was still dark. Dave fired up the stove and quickly made up some coffee while I got dressed. We pushed away from the dock at 5:30 and were trolling by 6:00. There were already 20 boats on the lake. Only a short distance from shore we got a breathtaking view of Mount Baker, which you totally miss while at the campground. The wakeup alarm on my cell phone suddenly went off, reminding me that work is for those who don’t fish. We had low expectations of catching anything, but we still gave it our all. This year there were more sockeye in the lake than ever in history, but the water was unusually warm (72 degrees!), making the fish stay deep and lazy. By 7:00 I counted 50 boats, which still didn’t seem too crowded on such a big lake.

We spent the next four hours putting around on my little-used 6 HP kicker. Even at idle speed the boat was still too fast for sockeye, so we put drift socks off the bow (kind of like drag chutes) to get the boat down to about 1 mph. Since we both had different tackle and different strategies, we each took two rods on one side to rig how we wanted. We never actually saw anybody catch a fish that day, although I later found a professional guide who told me that his boat had caught seven. We finally gave up about 10:30 and took a spin down to the far end of the lake just for fun. It was an absolutely gorgeous morning.

After lunch we went back out on the water for “downrigger drills”. Some of the things I had optimistically purchased last year were two basic manual downriggers. Downriggers allow you to troll your lures at a precise depth. I had never used them in the year and a half since I bought them, but I took them along on this trip. It was time to learn how to use them. Without actually attaching any hooks or bait, we practiced dropping dummy flashers down to 60 feet, simulating a fish strike, and then resetting. It was extremely valuable practice, as we made several mistakes that we learned from.

The next morning we resolved to get on the water even earlier. That day we arrived at the dock at 5:15. It was a festive atmosphere as about a dozen boats left the docks all at once, including retired couples, young families, and individuals. This time we deployed our downriggers for the first time. Unfortunately Dave had some frustrating difficulties with his depth counter slipping, which I will have to fix. However, since we could see the downrigger balls on the electronic fish finder, we were still able to mark our depth accurately. On that day we witnessed several people pulling sockeye onto their boats, and a couple of them were quite close to us. Still, we went another four-hour fishing day without success. It would be another “rebuilding year” for the Baker Lake Sockeye team. However, we really honed our skills, which should come in handy come coho season.

On the way home we stopped at a folksy diner in downtown Concrete, and then made a field trip to the nearby facility where they divert salmon swimming up the Baker River into trucks. From there they are driven around two dams and dumped into Baker Lake. It’s not a very natural process, but it’s crudely effective. This year so far more than 31,000 sockeye have been dumped into Baker Lake, which indicates a thriving fishery for at least this one species of salmon. When we started this trip I only had seven hours on the kicker since new, but we added eight more in this one trip. I’m done catching sand dabs – it’s time to put the kicker and downriggers to use to catch some salmon in Puget Sound this year.