Suttle Lake is experiencing a pretty severe algae bloom which brings up a couple questions.
1. How deep does the algae go, is it all the way to the bottom or only on the surface, or as deep as light penetrates?
2. Do your techiques differ much when fishing during a bloom. I tried ultra contrast lures and beeds but the did not seem to help. Most effective were apex in uv or bright orange.
marshworm
07-14-2008, 12:12 PM
dlm
saw you n' moknots was talkin' bout me when I was gone...good to know I was being thought of!
As far as algae n' Suttle here is what I have come up with over the years. Always been a pretty good bloom of the stuff up there. Some years not as bad as others. The one thing that algae does not like is cold water. Has to get to a certain temp for it to even survive. Also it would not surprise me if the bloom this year was more severe than usual with the amount of nutrients that continue to being washed into the lake from the fire in the Link Creek basin. Additionally I believe there will be a blue green algae warning at Suttle this year.
The algae does not extend clear to the bottom. The zooplankton ( koke food) come off the bottom each night and graze on the algae returning at day break.
A lot of people associate the algae bloom at Suttle with the lake "turning" and also equate this time to poor fishing.
Glad to see the bloom at Suttle. It's about 3 weeks late but that's good! As to the catching during the bloom don't forget kokes have to eat too! They just go about it differently during the bloom.
We can talk more at the re-union this week end.