Catch stats this week show the best days of the season in terms of keepers at Buoy 10, where any Chinook and hatchery coho as well as hatchery steelhead are open for retention.
ODFW estimated that anglers came in with 1.41 salmon each on Tuesday, 1.30 on Wednesday and 1.25 on Monday. A couple midmonth days did see higher daily Chinook catches, but Tuesday’s 3,106 salmon and Wednesday’s 2,996 are the largest overall hauls of the season so far.
Those were also the first two days that a wild king was back in the bag limit, which bolstered the catch.
Coho are particularly thick at the mouth of the Columbia right now. On a midweek day trip with Buzz Ramsey and friends, we easily turned back twice as many wilds as keepers, lost several others and had multiple bites that didn’t stick.
Buzz had us running a mix of blades and hoochies and SpinFish and skirts, mostly behind 360s, with around 12 ounces of weight and down 20, 29, 35, 45 and even 65 feet at one point.
With Buzz not wanting to get off to an o’dark hundred start, I was able to sleep in a bit more than usual, then headed to the coast through a few raindrops here and there, past a small herd of elk near Wolf Creek including a decent bull, and detoured around a boat that got launched about 40 miles too early.
We got off to a leisurely 8:30 or so a.m. start and trolled the outgoing tide from Hammond down to Social Security Beach a couple times.
As the tide bottomed out and switched to the incoming, we moved down to Buoy 10 and got into biters, including a triple that yielded two of our keepers, which also allowed me to redeem myself for a too timid moment on the net with the first fish of the day, a small coho that slipped the hook while I dithered and dawdled.
With the bow facing toward the ocean and the actual red buoy not too far off, Buzz worked us into a ripline where the big river and big ocean met. Some folks were finding fish; a source reported going to green-label herring here for his coho.
What set Wednesday apart for us was an unexpected and very close encounter with a whale near Buoy 10. I happened to look up and saw a huge back roll about 50 feet away, and then moments later, the whale jumped 100 feet away or so, corkscrewed and splashed back down. My camera decided it only wanted to take a fuzzy pic of the big splash, but the moment had the boat buzzing the rest of the day.
From there, we headed back upstream to the Sawdust Pile and Warrenton to fish the top of the incoming and start of the outgoing, collecting the largest coho of the day right off the mouth of the Hammond Marina, where we returned around 6 p.m. with four hatchery coho.
All in all, it was a great day of fishing with good company, Maggie’s great banana bread and cookies, and well worth the run.
Any Chinook retention is scheduled to stay open through September 6, NEXT Saturday, but as always, watch for reg changes on WDFW and ODFW’s sites.
Along with ODFW and WDFW catch stats, stay up to date on reports via guide Cody Herman’s daily updates.
