4.47 Million Salmon Stocked in One Lake in Washington State

Sharing is caring!

That’s right, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife was scheduled to stocked nearly 4.5 million salmon in a single lake this year.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, kinda.

WDFW has a kokanee salmon hatchery at Lake Whatcom near Bellingham, and they typically release millions of these tiny landlocked sockeye salmon into this one spot each year. Their annual stocking plan said they will stock 4,471,490 kokanee fry into Whatcom during the spring of 2025.

I don’t know if anyone is really counting down to the tens of fish swimming out into the lake, but just rounding that puppy to the nearest million is a LOT of salmon.

The reality here is that most of those micro-sized salmon won’t reach sizes large enough to eat. But a fair number will get to keeper sizes, and like their saltwater sockeye kin, kokanee are absolutely delicious.

Pan-sear these pan-sized salmon with a little oil and seasoning or slap them in the smoker and you won’t regret it. Honestly, put them into any recipe you have for any salmon or trout and you’re going to wonder where they’ve been your whole fishing life.

There’s a learning curve to catching kokanee. The most common way to do it is by trolling small, colorful lures including spoons, spinners, or hootchies behind some sort of attractor, such as a dodger or gang troll.

Sweeten your lure’s hook with some white shoe-peg corn, a real or artificial maggot, or other bait. Optionally, you can pre-load the corn with scent or add it right before you drop your gear into the drink.

Some anglers also deploy brightly colored jigs dropped into the schools of fish to provoke their natural aggression.

A few kokanee anglers catch them on bait alone, but this is fairly rare compared to the other methods.

Kokanee are cold-loving fish and they fare best in large, deep lakes and reservoirs. At times they can run quite deep, especially as the calendar moves into the summer months and the upper layers warm.

Not to discourage bank anglers, but boaters catch by far the majority of kokanee, which are simply out of casting range for nearly all year.

Math doesn’t lie. OK, it sometimes does. But in this case, the kokanee stocked at Lake Whatcom make up a whopping 42 percent of the 10.64 million freshwater trout and salmon that WDFW plans to stock this year.

That figure does not include fingerlings or fry the agency plans to deliver to alpine lakes, not the salmon and steelhead smolts released into rivers to bolster anadromous fish runs.

Lake Whatcom is stocked with more than 10 times the number of kokanee than any other lake in Washington, but that actually doesn’t mean it’s 10 times better for fishing. The reality is that there are a number of lakes across the Evergreen State that in a given year offer as good or better kokanee fishing.

Make sure to read our statewide article below to find your own new favorite kokanee fishing lake.

American Lake in Pierce County near Tacoma and Kachess Lake in Central Washington’s Kittitas County are each stocked with around 400,000 kokanee and can be productive.

That said, stocking isn’t the only game in town for kokanee. In some waters, kokanee take care of restocking on their own as they migrate into tributaries in the fall to spawn in masses of bright red fish. Lake Chelan and Lake Roosevelt are two fantastic examples where the kokanee do their own replenishing.

The stocking plan data in this article comes straight out of the state’s 2025 Statewide Trout and Kokanee Stocking Plan.