Another good source of information can be found among the 'Tech-Tips' provided by tackle manufacturer Luhr Jensen.

Though dodgers will catch trout and salmon on any lake large enough to troll, they are especially useful on Tahoe, where an angler employing a variety of sizes and colors can effectively fish anywhere from the rocky shoreline shallows to drop-offs hundreds of feet down. We'll get into the specifics, but I've found that the best way to learn about a lure is through fishing, so let's go!

1/29/04- Sand Harbor Brown Trout:
I had already caught my first browns of the year at the usual spots north and south of Cave Rock, but upon arrival at the boat ramp before dawn, I found that the current report on weather.com (light winds) was a little off. A steady northwest breeze was bringing in substantial waves- rollers in the distance, and two-foot breakers as they hit the shallows. I climbed up the rip-rap boulders next to the ramp and stood watching the water for a few minutes, hoping for a change. No such luck, and so I drove another fifteen miles to Sand Harbor. Depending on the angle of the north wind, this launch can be less choppy than Cave Rock, and it also has a large natural breakwater formed by rocky points on both sides of the ramp, allowing me to fish the main lake yet quickly duck into this safe zone if needed. Indeed, the surface at Sand Harbor had smaller waves, and I was able to launch my motorized canoe with ease. Traveling south off Sand Point I looked to the eastern peaks, where heavy cloud cover blotted out the first rays of sunrise. The water reflected the same steel-gray color, so I chose a favorite dodger for low-light conditions, a glow-in-the-dark Sep's Pro that I customized with a hand-painted rainbow trout pattern. A twenty-inch leader and live minnow on a treble hook completed this rig, and as always, I applied fish-attractant to both dodger and bait. Lately, the brown trout have been favoring Pro-Cure salmon egg oil, but shortly after letting out 100 yards of line and beginning a shallow-water trolling run, my first fish was a three-pound mackinaw. Not that I'm complaining, mind you; my ultra light steelhead rod, spinning reel spooled with eight-pound test, and six-pound fluorocarbon leader all worked together to thrill me as the fish gave a great fight for its size.

"Grow up!" I told the fish as I brought it alongside my canoe and shook the hook free from its jaw with needle-nose pliers. Squirting more salmon-egg oil on the dodger and still-intact minnow, I let out my line again, casting a wary glance toward dark windlines curving across the water's surface. On a lake this size, these lines can be deceiving, appearing to move in from a distance at a lazy pace, until one reaches you and you realize it's been formed and pushed forward by the leading edge of a twenty-mile-per-hour gust. I fished without a bite for another hour in gradually worsening conditions, but just as the wind buffeted me a bit too close to exposed offshore rocks, my rod doubled over in its holder, and I looked back to see a large trout already launching into the air, 300 feet behind the canoe! Panic drill: check the drag, check the wind, check which way the fish is headed- check the drag again... how did the wind change so quick? How did the fish change direction even quicker? How did the trolling motor's tiller swing so far out of reach? Several minutes and one more leap later, I had the five-pound brown trout squirming in my net. Having released my last two Tahoe browns, I decided to take this one home, so I quickly dumped it into the canoe and let it thrash as I turned my motor to high speed and bee-lined for the launch ramp as small whitecaps formed on growing waves.

Interestingly, when I cleaned the fat hen, I found she was eating her own eggs. Inside her body cavity were almost-empty egg skeins, still holding a few pink-orange orbs the size of store-bought salmon eggs. When I cut open her stomach and intestines to see what she'd been eating, I found crayfish, freshwater shrimp, and more of the same eggs. No wonder the salmon-egg oil has been working so well!

2/4/04- Tahoe Slam:
Captain Gene St. Denis of Blue Ribbon Fishing Charters (www.blueribbonfishing.com) is one of the best guides on the lake, and I've wanted to meet him ever since I saw his picture in the Tahoe Daily Tribune two years ago, holding up the largest known two-mackinaw limit taken here, fish of twenty and twenty-eight pounds. A mutual friend introduced us recently, and after a long conversation in which we covered many aspects of fishing dodgers and established that we were both hardcore trout-hunting fanatics, we agreed to get together. I met Gene at his house and rode with him to Cave Rock boat ramp, where I helped him launch his custom-built twenty-foot Alumaweld boat. Based on wind conditions and the best bite on his last charter, he decided to motor at high speed to Camp Richardson, on the lake's southwest shore. As we neared Camp Rich, he slowed his vessel and began preparing gear to employ his unique deepwater fishing method.

"When the macks are aggressive in spring, I'll fish artificial lures, but right now, it's hard to beat a big dodger with a minnow on a short leader." Gene told me. "A chrome, Luhr-Jensen Herring Dodger is the Tahoe standard, but when I go deeper than 200 feet, I like to use a size 001 or 002 Abe 'n Al Flasher that I paint white." Technically, the Abe 'n Al, also available from Luhr Jensen, is not a dodger but an ocean salmon flasher, designed to rotate in full circles when in motion. Gene trolls this lure so slow, though, that it acts as a dodger, kicking from side to side and imparting the same zig-zag motion to the minnow on a twelve to sixteen-inch leader. He is also a firm believer in fish-attractant, using several scents including Pro-Cure sardine oil on his mackinaw rigs. When I told him I knew how to work his Scotty electric downriggers, he let me act as deckhand; I let out an Abe 'n Al thirty feet behind the boat and put the line in the release clip, then he looked at his depth finder and found a depth of 300 feet, yelling "Drop her to 260!"

"Don't these Scottys only come with 250 feet of cable?" I asked as I lowered the ten-pound cannonball on one downrigger while he came aft and lowered the other.

"Yeah, but I put 600 feet on them, so I can get REALLY deep." Now, I've always advocated fishing shallow for mackinaw whenever possible, for the simplicity and the light-tackle fun. I've also been told that the largest mackinaw on Tahoe are not usually found extremely deep anyway. Gene, however, proves this belief wrong by consistently catching fish over ten pounds at depths between 200 and 300 feet. He finds that these deep fish often follow and feed on schools of freshwater shrimp, and as he left the downriggers and went forward again to steer the boat and check his Bottomline 5300 fish finder, he told me it indicated we were passing over just such a school of tiny crustaceans.

We were also coming up a steep incline, and just as Gene told me to bring the downrigger ball up to 240 feet to avoid hitting the bottom, my rod started kicking. "Reel down tight and pop the clip!" He told me, and as I did so the Ugly Stik rod dipped hard toward the water and I was onto the deepest mackinaw I've ever caught. I slowly worked my prize to the surface, and Gene netted the six-pounder for me, but after this auspicious start, gusty winds repeatedly pushed us away from the tip of the underwater peninsula where we hooked our fish.

After several more unsuccessful attempts to repeat our trolling line against the wind, Gene asked if I minded taking a break to replenish his supply of live minnows by putting out minnow traps in the rocky shallows near Emerald Bay. "Fine by me," I replied, "as long as you give me some; I need a few big ones for my next canoe trip." We laid two traps at different depths, and noticed that in this section of the lake, the winds were not as strong. "What about a little top lining?" I asked, and Gene's face lit up with a huge grin. Fishing deep and putting clients onto big mackinaw pays his bills, but like me, he first learned Tahoe by trolling shallow, and he still loves to do so when he has the chance. His specialty is trolling minnow plugs, and he's caught brown trout over ten pounds and mackinaw over twenty doing so. "It's a little slow for rainbows and browns now, because the water's so cold" he told me.

But when I told him the story of my five-pound brown caught trolling a dodger the week before, and reminded him that I had brought along my overstuffed tackle bag and steelhead rod, he agreed to let me try my slow-trolling method in an area I don't know well. We trolled a tiny Sep's Sidekick dodger with a night crawler on one rod, and a size 040 Jensen dodger with a minnow on the other. We smeared both dodgers with salmon-egg oil, and I used a Pro-Cure bait oil injector to fill both the night crawler and minnow with a scent mixture including Pro-Cure herring oil and Pro-Cure Trophy-Trout bait sauce.

Was it the dodgers? The live bait trailing clouds of fish attractant? Or how about the expert boat captain weaving in and out of treacherous, rocky shallows? YES! All of the above: over the next two hours, we caught a five-pound mackinaw, a three-pound brown, and two small rainbows, all on six-pound line! In one day, we fished from shallow to extremely deep water, used dodgers from less than three inches to over a foot long, and we caught three species of trout! It just could not get any better... Well, I guess a bigger rainbow trout would have been nice.

2/11/04 Sierra Steelhead:
Okay, now I can relax and sit home writing fishing stories while a wet winter storm floods my garage. I don't care because my favorite lake just gave up a monster rainbow! When I launch my canoe for a sunrise trip at Cave Rock, I usually troll minnow plugs for a fish or two before the sun hits the water, but I was just so darn tickled with the recent performance of dodgers that I started with them, and quickly caught a nice mackinaw off a shallow rock pile, using my custom-painted Sep's glow-in-the-dark model.

Then I fished most of the morning without another bite. After trolling several miles of shoreline, when I couldn't find fish willing to bite twenty-feet down I moved a bit further out in the lake and twisted a one-ounce rubber core sinker on my line to fish near the bottom in sixty feet. Feeling confident this would catch me another mackinaw, I was not surprised when my rod bent over, but quickly changed my mind as to which species I'd hooked.

The rod-tip was moving too frantically, too quickly. Line zipped off the reel against the drag in rapid spurts, and I knew this was not the slow, powerful movement of a lake trout but the lightning fight of a big rainbow! What the heck is wrong with me? Everybody knows that on Tahoe you're supposed to fish deep for macks and shallow for rainbows, and now I've gone and reversed the whole thing! My consequence for disobeying the rules was a twenty-seven inch, seven pound rainbow trout, caught on a silver Jensen dodger, Lahontan redside minnow, and an injection of Pro-Cure bait oil.

Those of you who favor artificial lures, take heart, your time will come on Tahoe in a month or two when water temperatures increase, and I did catch another rainbow, seventeen inches long, while fast trolling a Rapala Jointed plug back to the boat launch at noon. Shortly after I landed my canoe on the corrugated concrete ramp at Cave Rock State Park, my new friend Gene St. Denis pulled up with a boatload of happy clients. Gene had been fishing north shore, trolling his trusty Abe n' Al flashers at 250 feet to find limits of fat mackinaw for his customers. He also told me that he's been using small dodgers in the shallows to catch some good rainbows and browns, which would explain his jovial mood and hearty congratulations when he saw my big rainbow and volunteered to photograph it for me. Thanks Gene!

Dodger Tips:
Lures such as flutter-spoons, plastic squid and trolling flies also work well behind dodgers, but it's hard to beat a fresh minnow or night crawler. For information on trapping minnows and threading them on the leader, check out my article 'Fishing With Minnows'. Use a wormthreader to rig night crawlers (www.wormthreader.net), and with either bait remember to troll slow, one mile-per-hour or less.

Color choice can be critical to success as well. Kokanee salmon like crazy colors, and their preference will vary daily, so it helps to have a selection. For shallow water trout, I usually start with silver dodgers for clear water and sunny skies, and gold for murky lakes or overcast conditions. When fishing deep, dodgers that incorporate green, blue, chartreuse, white or glow-in-the-dark material excel, and at 100 feet or deeper, large dodgers will also out produce small ones. This is not only due to a larger surface area for the fish to spot in the limited light available at depth, but also the stronger 'sonic signature' or vibration pattern put out. The dodger swinging back and forth sets up pressure waves that fish feel along their lateral lines, making dodgers effective even at extreme depth or in the dark of a moonless night. The size, shape and weight of each dodger determines its sonic signature, and fish will show preference for certain dodger sizes and shapes just as they do for certain colors. Experiment!

Until next time,
Mark (never stand in a canoe) Wiza
Email Me!

More Articles & Reports by Mark Wiza