Fishing Heartbreak at Baker Lake

Fishing is a tough skill to learn, especially in the Northwest. When you see one of those photos of a guy with a fish, you might not appreciate how much patience, skill, and determination went into catching that fish. There’s a hundred things that have to go right, starting with learning how to safely operate, trailer, and launch the boat, and ending with netting the fish and making sure it’s legal to keep. If any one of those things go wrong, you go home empty handed (or worse). In my case, it was a knot.

Although I’m primarily a saltwater fisherman, I love sockeye fishing at Baker Lake. In addition to being one of the most stunningly beautiful places I’ve ever been, it’s also a refreshingly different type of fishery than I’m used to in Puget Sound. I love the variety. This was my third year giving it a try; the first two we got skunked. Despite last year’s failure, my fishing buddy Dave had booked our campsite last January to give it another go.

The stereotype of fishing is that it involves sitting with a line in the water aimlessly for hours on end, waiting for something to happen. Although there’s an element of that, people who are serious about catching have to be not only patient, but also proactive, persistent, and certainly not lazy. Dave and I are increasingly organized and disciplined; we treat it like a military operation. We plan a strategy in advance. We have as many things staged beforehand as possible, so that we can hit the ground running when we get there. We sometimes use backup rods to make pit-stop style changes to our gear, to get it back in the water fast. We pull up our gear to check for problems at regular intervals. We keep trying different speeds, different lures, and different locations until we figure it out. Our dedication is paying off – we’re finally starting to catch fish.

After setting up camp on Wednesday afternoon, we took the boat out to test the evening bite and to run a little dress rehearsal for the next morning. Although downrigger fishing is basically a team sport, we each use our own rods and tackle, and fish at different depths. We have a little rivalry going, but we also root for each to succeed. Back in camp, we studied our gear carefully and I decided to shorten all my lures by a few inches to increase their motion.

During sockeye season, the Swift Creek Campground is a busy place at Zero Dark 30. About 3:00 you start to hear trucks towing boats down to the boat launch, and by 4:00 you hear the buzz of boat motors zipping across the lake in the dark. They have a floating dock with about 20 slips, allowing campers like us to leave our boats in the water overnight all prepped to go.

At first light on Thursday morning, we hopped in the boat and headed to the fishing grounds. It was the first time I had ever needed my running lights. By 6:00 I had already got a fish on the line, a first for me at Baker Lake. It fought for a moment, and then was gone. When I pulled up my gear my lure was gone, and only the clip it was tied to remained. It happened right where I had shortened it the night before. It was a disappointment, but all part of the game. A couple of hours later, we both got a fish on at the same time. Dave lost his while I fought mine. When mine broke the surface, I could see it was a sockeye with the distinctive green back. Dave grabbed the net, but my fish suddenly lurched and broke free as I groaned in despair. When I reeled my gear in, it again had only the clip. Another lure had come free along with the fish, in the same place. Later that morning, it happened to me a third time the exact same way. Something was very wrong. I had fished well, and had nothing to show for it.

That evening in camp, Dave and I studied my knots. He thought that I was missing a loop at the end, but they were very tight and we couldn’t pull them apart. We decided that the problem must have been damaged, kinked up line on the ones I had shortened. Fortunately I had a couple of fresh spares still in the package. I tied a brand new line to the clip and staged it for the next day.

On Friday morning we got an even earlier start, and we had to look hard in the darkness for the snags we knew were near the boat launch. This time Dave got a fish on about 5:45 a.m., and I successfully netted it and brought it aboard. It was our first Baker Lake sockeye! A little while later I checked my gear and found that my lure was again gone, leaving only the clip. I must not have noticed the bite. This was a brand new lure, so the only thing all my failures had in common was the knot. I abandoned all my lures and borrowed Dave’s. However, I didn’t get another bite the rest of the day. Later in the morning, I noticed one of Dave’s rods whip back and forth and then straighten as a fish pulled it free from the downrigger ball. He again reeled in a nice sockeye, and I again netted it and brought it aboard.

Although I didn’t win an individual medal, I’d say the team got silver. We have an agreement that we share our catch, so we each took home a nice 22″, four-pound sockeye. Mine was a female, and my wife later decided to learn how to make tasty caviar from the eggs. My exasperation at losing as many as four fish was offset by the knowledge that I had done everything else right. I had gained a lot of confidence. Many other fishermen came home with nothing, but we’re Baker Lake contenders now. It was wonderful to spend some time away from cell phone reception, able to focus on fishing, friendship, and the beauty of nature. We plan to do it again next year.