Can we catch Baker Lake sockeye with a broken kicker?

Our annual Baker Lake fishing trip is probably our favorite of the whole season. It’s got to be one of the most absolutely beautiful places to fish in the whole lower 48 states. It’s also the most complicated trip of the year. To fish for sockeye there, we have to use slightly different techniques than we do for other kinds of salmon, and different tackle. This is an early morning fishery, so your chances will be best if you’re on the water at daybreak, and that’s hard to do that unless you camp there. We run four rods instead of the usual two, so there’s more to keep track of. One of the biggest challenges is that we have to troll extra slow, around 1 mph. The only way to go that slow is to use my “kicker” motor at idle speed, plus put out drift socks, which are basically little parachutes in the water which slow the boat down. Plus, there’s no cell service there, and the nearest services are half an hour’s drive away. We have to pack everything we need with us, and make damn sure not to forget anything.

I always seem to have some big mechanical malfunction right before the Baker Lake trip that needs to be fixed. Last year I had to learn how to patch a hole I had punched in my fiberglass hull. This year it was the trailer. The previous Friday I had fished for chinook with Todd. That day one trailer wheel had refused to roll when I pulled it out of the garage, and I was just dragging a rubber trail down the road. This problem had been getting progressively worse over the past few months. I was finally able to get it to move by rocking it back and forth, but I knew I needed to get it looked at urgently before taking it all the way to Baker Lake, about two hours’ drive from my home. Because campsites were so hard to get, there was no option to reschedule the trip. So, I found a mobile mechanic who came all the way from Friday Harbor to look at it. The whole inside of my drum brakes were rusted to hell, and I needed all new bearings and brakes, which was a $1500 repair. It was painful, but after that it rolled down the road smooth as butter.

Dave and I had both taken Friday off to get an early start on our weekend, “early” meaning 5:00 a.m. We knew we wouldn’t get there in time for the morning bite, but our goal was to launch about 9:00 and see what we could catch before checking in to our campsite at 2:00. It would prove to be a good decision. We launched on schedule, and I moved the boat around to an adjacent floating dock with 20 slips to pick up Dave. We managed to get in about four hours of fishing time. We were both fishing one rod on the downrigger and one off the back with a “dropper” rig, which is just a weight on a slider which holds your lure underwater. My downrigger rig got stuck on something on the bottom, perhaps a submerged tree. I was holding a lot of tension on it when I asked Dave to snip it for me. When he did, the rod snapped like a whip, I almost fell over, and the top of the rod simply disappeared, never to be seen again. I had brought three rods with one as a spare, and now I was down to two at the very beginning of the trip. Nevertheless the first fish went to me, and it was a very nice sized one. A little while later Dave got one too. With two in the bucket and a gorgeous view of Mount Baker, we were feeling pretty chuffed. We weren’t used to catching fish on the first day, and back in camp we had to gut them in the field and get them into the cooler.

I had only had time to tie four leaders for the trip, and I had just lost two. One was lost on the clipped line and the other got shredded by the fish I caught. That evening in camp we both spent a couple of hours tying up a whole board full of new leaders. Last year I lost at least three fish to cheap premade leaders I bought, which all snapped when I got a fish on. It was a totally heartbreaking experience, and one I was sure not to repeat. I used heavy 30 pound line, and tied them myself. I had been using what’s called a Uni knot, but Dave taught me how to properly tie the modified clinch knot, which I used to tie to the swivel at the top end of the leader. A couple of my knots looked questionable, but I decided to use them because I didn’t want to tie the whole leader over again from scratch. It was a decision I would regret.

The next day I was awake at 4:00 a.m. and Dave arose shortly after. I was so tired that the 3:00 trucks launching their boats didn’t wake me, although I did hear the guy winding up his loud ass two-stroke on the lake as he foolishly blasted across it in the pitch dark. Dave put the coffee on, and I went down to get the boat ready while he took care of the camp. We pushed away as soon as he got there, and even though it barely daybreak we could already see the twinkling lights of maybe 50 other boats already fishing. Dave likes to run the kicker while we fish, so he started it up and we got lines in the water. Just a few minutes later it died. We realized that were set to run on the little one-liter internal tank, rather than from the boat’s main fuel tank, and somehow ran on it all day on Friday. We had just run it dry, but when we switched to external fuel it just wouldn’t start. We took turns pulling on it to no avail. We decided to start the main engine, and just bump it in and out of gear all morning to maintain trolling speed. This required one person to do nothing but that all day. It was also hard on the engine, and worst of all we didn’t get a single bite all day. Something about the constant shifting gears and changing speed made the fish shy away from us.

About 10:30 we finally gave up, and decided to go back to the dock to get a better look at the problem. I turned the boat around backwards so that the motor was easy to access without hanging over the water. I got my jerry can from the car and refueled the internal tank, but still wouldn’t start. We decided to go into Concrete to get an internet signal and buy some tools. We found a hardware store that time forgot, which had no electronic point of sale and still ran their business using notes in pen and a sliding credit card machine. We bought a spark plug wrench and some sandpaper. On the way back we saw something astonishing: a bear crossing the road. It was only the second time in my life I had seen a bear in the wild. Dave used the wrench to pull the spark plug. It was quite black and sooty, so he cleaned it with the sandpaper. However, it still wouldn’t start. I dug out the manual, and Dave spent a long time reading it. He learned that in order to start the kicker on the internal tank, you first need to disconnect the external fuel hose. We went back down to the boat and gave that a try, and Dave was finally able to start the engine. He was able to switch it to external fuel after it was running. He never learned why it had failed to start on external fuel all day though, and it was still pretty finicky.

The next morning we arose similarly early, and headed to the boat hoping to make the best of the remains of our fishing trip. Once in our fishing area, Dave was able to get the kicker going and I got my dropper rig down soon afterwards. Just as I was working on my downrigger rod, Dave called out that I already had a fish on! I grabbed the rod and reeled it in, and Dave successfully netted it. It was a great win for the day, and boosted our confidence. A few minutes later, the kicker died again. Dave had apparently bumped it down to idle before it was warmed up. He pulled on it for a while until it restarted again, and we continued on. A couple of hours later I was bending my other light rod over to clip to the downrigger, and the upper half suddenly snapped in three pieces! I had started with three rods and was now down to one. A little while later, Dave and I both got a fish on at the same time. It was pandemonium. His was first, so I decided to net his before tending to mine. When this was accomplished, I turned to my one rod and started reeling it in. I could tell that I had lost the fish though. When I pulled it up I could see that my dodger was there but the leader was gone. My knot had failed just like it did several times last year. Dave got one more fish before the day was done, leaving us with three for the day and five for the trip. We finally decided to get off the water at 11:30, which made us late for our noon checkout. Despite numerous mishaps, we considered it a successful weekend. It was a great experience, and a great confidence booster to overcome so many difficulties to bring home the fish. Dave generously let me take the three smaller fish, and he took the two big ones. Mine yielded seven pounds of cleaned fillets ready for smoking, which is plenty to share with friends and family. I can’t wait until next year!