The Chinook numbers on the other hand seem somewhat questionable. For those of you whom fished the Big One Derby in August you know how tough it was to find the 4 year old class of fish. Those fish are starting to run up the Coeur D Alene river now so let them spawn and maybe we can get some numbers up. I encourage you to call The IDFG and ask them to let the CDA Chinooks live , don¡¦t kill the spawning beds and don¡¦t snag the fish out of the river. The good news is as we get into late summer and fall the bite on the 2-3 year old fish gets steady. The fish are deep now in the 80-100 . foot range and can be caught with an 8 inch flasher about 24 inches leader and a mini-squid or a helmeted herring. The north end off of Tubbs hill or Arrow point have been producing bites a lot of small sub legal fish under 20 inches but a few keepers in the 20-24 inch range as well. This bite also improves as we get into September and later in the fall.
The Smallmouth are feeding heavy on crawdads right now so the twin tail grubs with a lead head jig will work every time. They will bite tubes and drop shot and a lot of other plastics as well. If you start in 20-30 foot of water and work the bottom you should get plenty of action. Some of the larger fish may be deeper or even on weed lines this time of the year.