Sockeye are arguably the best-eating salmon in the world, and as the summer rolls in, so do they. In Washington State, we are lucky enough to have several great sockeye fisheries to enjoy, both in the river and the lakes. No matter where you end up chasing them, there are a lot of basic building blocks to being a successful sockeye fisherman. Take those fundamentals and with a few location-specific tweaks, you can be successful just about anywhere you choose to target these tasty, feisty fish.
To start, let's talk about some basic sockeye fundamentals and what makes them tick. Unlike other salmon, sockeye are filter feeders, which means their diets mostly consist of krill and zooplankton. They are schooling fish who like to travel in numbers, which can make fishing for them more hunting and waiting that turns into a flurry of chaos. They also have the largest eyes of any salmon species, making them more light sensitive, but they can also see your gear from further away, bonus! We need to keep all these little quirks in mind while targeting sockeye to be successful.
Because sockeye are schooling fish, we need to focus our fishing time where they are most likely to travel. In the rivers, we’re looking for soft seams and slower water, or places that will hold them like thermal barriers, as is the case at Brewster. In the lakes, sockeye will cruise around in pods, looking for more of their kind to join as they get closer and closer to spawning. We can use this to our advantage by using dodgers and flash to mimic a school of fish and pull them into our gear from a distance.
My favorite way to do this is trolling with dodgers, with my go-tos being the Mack's Sling Blade in 9” or 6” or the good ole standby 0 Les Davis. Metallic finishes like just a plain chrome will work for sockeye in any water, but I do love having a mix of metallics and colored dodgers. Sockeye are pretty lazy fish, so our troll speed is pretty slow, fluctuating between 0.8-1.5mph. Once we have them joined and following our gear, it's time for our lures and bait (where allowed) to do their job.
Since sockeye are filter feeders, and we target them in the freshwater, they aren’t attacking our lures as a feeding response. This means that they are grabbing our hooks out of reaction. Although the Lake Washington classic of bare red hooks still works, we can improve this reaction bite by using hoochies or flys, UV, flash or glow depending on time of day, and wings or blades that add even more flash and vibration.
It’s pretty fun to have what my friends and I call “craft time” and build different lures and see what works best. My top color choices for sockeye, no matter where I go, are pink, orange, and red. I tie my sockeye leaders on heavy fluorocarbon, 25-40lb, with number 2 to 2/0 hooks. Not because they are big fish that are going to break your line, but because the heavier the line, the more action the dodger will impart to your lure.
Sockeye are also hard-hitting, aerobatic, and chaotic. They will take off and tangle up multiple rods or wrap around downrigger cable or anything else they can find. You’ll be glad for the heavier leader when (not if) this happens. My basic sockeye leader is 12” overall, and always has no less than 2 hooks.
Once you have your leaders tied up, if you’re fishing where bait is allowed, it's sure to help your odds of hooking dinner. Cured coonshrimp, in pink or red, is a pretty universal sockeye bait; however, chunks of cured prawns work great too. In the fisheries closer to the salt, like Baker Lake, the Skagit, and the lower Columbia, live sand shrimp work very well. Scents can help you as well, and maybe even more so than other salmon; sockeye have a real sweet tooth. Slammin’ Sam’s XXX is one of my favorite sockeye scents, and I will even go as far as sprinkling my baits with pure granulated sugar. Aside from those, the regular standbys work great, like anise, garlic, and krill. Keep in mind that if you are fishing somewhere like Lake Wenatchee, which doesn’t allow bait, you also are not allowed to use scent.
These basics will get you started on the right foot when it comes to sockeye fishing, but each fishery has its own nuances. I approach each fishery differently, whether it’s a lake or river, how far from the saltwater I am, and water and weather conditions all play a role. We covered a little bit of this already, but let's get into a little more depth with some of my favorite fisheries.
Baker Lake is what I consider my “home lake” and where I do most of my sockeye fishing, spending as much as 50 days a year there. Baker Lake is a big, crystal clear lake that tends to stay on the colder side. It has a lot of structure, being a reservoir, with a few original lakes being big deep spots, lots of shelves, shallows, and some sunken forests/stumps. We generally focus our attention on the deeper water areas and along the edges of shelves, with most of our fish coming in the top 40’ of water.
This allows me to leave my downriggers at home and just fish “droppers,” which is using lead cannon balls ranging from 4-10 ounces on sliders, followed by a 24-30” bumper line and then my dodger and leader. My heaviest lead is on my rods closest to the bow, with my lightest leads being out the back of the boat, and my line out is the opposite (shortest at the bow and longest at the stern).
An example of this, while running 6 rods, would be my bow rods having 10oz out 30’, my middle rods having 8oz out 40’, and my stern rods having 6oz out 50’. This gives me a good spread while keeping the rods from getting tangled with each other while trolling and turning, yet still keeping them pretty close in depth to give the illusion of a school of fish swimming together. This technique also allows us to get the gear out and fishing quicker, covers more water, and moves more in the water column during turns and speed changes. Baker Lake is also the place I troll the slowest for sockeye, with my target speed being around 0.8-1 mph.
I take this same technique to Brewster Pool, and really, any excuse I have to leave the downriggers off the boat, I will take! Our biggest differences here are that there’s much more current to take into consideration, and we are fishing in shallower water. Those currents are something to watch too, with how busy this fishery gets, you have the main current of the Columbia River as well as the incoming current from the Okanogan River.
This Okanogan current will slow you down and can push you sideways into passing boats, so be extra aware of your surroundings. Here’s another reason I love fishing “droppers” because you can really see the action of your dodger, and in changing currents, I watch the thump of my rod to tell me I’m going the right speed instead of my speed over ground on my electronics.
Here at Brewster, I tend to use lighter leads than at Baker, more 3-6 ounces and target 20-35’ deep on average. Although as the day progresses and the sun gets higher, if the heat doesn’t get me off the water, I will start fishing deeper as those big eyes balls will start to drive the sockeye down to escape the sun. My go-to bait here is coonies, and pink is definitely my top color.
Some fish will take a detour before getting all the way to Brewster and end up in Lake Wenatchee. Although the one single lane launch can make this fishery a little difficult to access, the fishing here is usually great and the fish tend to be bittier than at Baker.
This fishery is the most unique of all my sockeye fisheries, and I even have a Wenatchee-specific tackle box with all my tools of sockeye destruction. This is the one sockeye fishery I always bring my downriggers to, although I do still fish some droppers. I definitely have more success on the downriggers. Even though this lake is cold, deep, and clear like Baker, these Wenatchee fish seem to travel and be active deeper, and I catch most of my fish from 40-80’ deep. This fishery also doesn’t allow bait or scent, and to make up for this, we do some crazy stuff with our tackle.
Barbless hooks are also required here, which means a lot of lost fish. I always fish with at least two hooks and often three to up the odds of landing a fish. I still tie heavy fluorocarbon leaders but keep them on the short side, 8-10” overall. I don’t use a whole bunch of extra stuff on my leaders here, usually opting for one bead above each hook and sometimes a Mack’s Smile Blade on top of that bead.
If I’m feeling really crazy I’ll throw a little LP plankton hoochie on there too, but I like to keep my profiles small here. The crazy part comes when you start checking out my dodgers. Here again, I use 0 dodgers or large Slingblades, but I get really crazy with the bends and accentuate them by increasing the bends on each end. By the time I’m done with them, they resemble an “S” more than a dodger. All this gives my gear a really erratic action, and my troll speed is a little faster here, where I try to keep it around 1-1.4mph.
So you can see that there are a lot of similarities from one fishery to another, and if you take the basic sockeye building blocks to any of these places, you’ll probably catch fish. But if you can tweak your program a little bit to really fit where you're fishing, your success will increase, and space in your freezer will decrease!
