yesterday "the troutfisherman" and i trolled lake roosevelt and caught trout from 14 to 20 inches. we believe one trout was a kokanee, amidst a lot of rainbow that we netted.

can someone tell me a sure-fire way of identifying a kokanee? please don't tell me that kokanee always have deeply forked tails, because i've examined too many to trout to find that reliable. yesterday the fish that "looked" different had no hint of pink along the lateral line, and it's tail was mostly squared; several of the clearly identifiable rainbow had deeply forked tails. the 20 inch rainbow had a tail that was almost perfectly squared off.

i've read on some web sites that rainbow have 9 to 11 rays in the anal fin, and kokanee have 13 to 15 or more rays. that sounded like a "scientific" way to identify kokanee, except that upon close examination i find it challenging to decide what is a ray and what is not; the short or small "rays" could be either counted or not, to my untrained and unscientific eye.

i've read that kokanee primarily eat plankton, and stomach contents in a couple fish i thought were kokanee were a brownish, mushy substance with no hint of any baitfish parts.

thanks for any help someone can be.

john

There are chinook in lake Rosevelt that come in from Idaho by way of the Spokane River.
I have caught them in long lake one dam away from Rosevelt. Did it have a black mouth?

all the fish we netted had white mouths.