Jared Domin’s late summer fishing trip to Kootenay Lake was a double win, dominating a family fishing wager and scooping up $1,000 in prizes in the Kootenay Lake Anger Incentive Program monthly draw.
The Sparwood, B.C., resident has been visiting the lake regularly with his dad in recent years.
“I spend a bit of time there when I was younger and then I started coming back last year to fish with my dad in his boat,” said Domin. “He invited me and had his brother down, so we were looking to get out on the water and make a long weekend of it.”
The trio set up a bet to see who could bring in their catches consistently, such that “if you lose a fish it passes to the next guy. I got them all in the boat, so it was my weekend. I got three bull trout and eight rainbows.”
Domin mainly fishes rivers, but he knows his stuff.
“We were using downriggers to get the bull trout, down about 100 feet, and bucktails floating on top for the rainbows,” Domin explained.
Jared’s father made sure they dropped their trout heads at Woodbury Resort and Marina to enter the Kootenay Lake Angler Incentive Program draw and, sure enough, Jared won the monthly prize of two $500 gift certificates from local businesses.
The program encourages anglers to harvest rainbow and bull trout in the main body of Kootenay Lake and then turn in the heads to local depots to enter a monthly draw for a prize worth $1,000. In addition to the monthly prizes, this year’s grand prizes include a 2022 Ford F-150, with the off-road Tremor package, from Nelson Ford and a 2022 Polaris side-by-side from Main Jet Motorsports.
This citizen-driven initiative is intended to reduce the over-abundance of rainbow and bull trout in the lake and promote the recovery of their main prey, the endangered kokanee salmon.
“This is the first time I’ve won anything in a really long time,” said Domin. “When you live in a small community there just aren’t that many opportunities, so it was a really good day for me.”
He chose to collect his prizes from Main Jet Motorsports in Nelson and Mawson Sports in Creston.
Fine weather attracted plenty of anglers to Kootenay Lake in September, resulting in 1,271 entries to the draw in the past month and 3,509 to date this year. More than 13,400 trout have been pulled from the lake and entered over the last three years.
HOW TO ENTER: Anglers must bring an intact fish head (or full fish for Woodbury tissue sample) to one of four return depos: Balfour Gill & Gift Gas Station, Woodbury Resort, Crawford Bay Market, or Wynndel Foods & Outdoor Gear.
Kootenay Lake Angler Incentive Program is managed by the local West Arm Outdoors Club with support from B.C. Wildlife Federation, Freshwater Fisheries Society of BC, Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, and several local merchants from around Kootenay Lake.
The Ministry urges anglers to continue to participate in this program and harvest all of their catch within daily quota limits to support the recovery of Kootenay Lake’s kokanee salmon.
More information on the Kootenay Lake Angler Incentive Program: https://bcwf.bc.ca/kootenay-lake-angler-incentive-program/