Lake Sammamish Fishing Report – February 2016

I finally had one of those rare winter days where my schedule and the weather lined up and I was able to get out and do some fishing.

This time I was looking for some relaxing, so my friend and I went to nearby Lake Sammamish for some leisurely trolling for cutthroat.

The parking lot was fairly full when I arrived. Judging by the style of trailers my guess was that the bass fishermen were out in force that day. And indeed we saw a fair amount of boats fishing along the shoreline and docks. But there was a handful of boats that seemed to be trolling for trout too.

Thanks to regular maintenance the motors started right up, and after giving them a few minutes to warm up we were off.

There have been a couple areas of the lake that I’ve been wanting to map out, so we spent the first 30 minutes or so hitting those areas and recording sonar data. Later I’ll upload that data to Insights Genesis to improve the shared map. The improved map will come in handy for future fishing trips.

Then we finally got down to fishing. I started with my go to wedding ring setup for this lake, and my buddy put on his.

The fish were fairly scattered around, and we were unable to find any concentrations of them. The finder would show a fish here and a fish there – and that is how our catching went too.

Since the water was still on the cool side, about 46 degrees, we focused near the top of the water column and trolled slow, about 1.0-1.2 MPH.

We hit all the typical spots, like the mouth of Issaquah creek, off points and around the weather bouy – not to mention my favorite spots I’ve mapped out over the years.

We switched up our gear several times and tried spoons and rapala lures, in addition to the wedding rings. But like usual the wedding ring lures did the best and resulted in all the fish.

All the fish caught were fairly shallow – 10 to 20 feet down. We did see deeper fish on the finder, but attempting to chase them didn’t result in any bites.