Neah Bay Fishing Trip August 2020

Camping and fishing Neah Bay for a prime week in July/August? This fishing trip report is a must-read! We had an incredible time catching limits of salmon and bottom fish in the Neah Bay and Sekiu area.

The water around Neah Bay, Cape Flattery, and Tatoosh Island is indescribable. Yet I will attempt! It’s like being on another planet.

Trying to capture it via video or photo is just disappointing compared to actually being there. Seeing the trees growing straight out of the edges of the cliffs, the network of sea caves below each cliff face.

The massive pillars of rock. Tatoosh Island with its cove-dotted shoreline and lighthouse. The whales…Oh, and the fishing is pretty good there too!

Here’s a page that goes into much more detail on how to fish for salmon around Sekiu.

We fished right up to the closures at the end of July in Marine Area 5 and Marine Area 4 west of the Bonilla-Tatoosh line. This was my first time fishing west of Wadaah Island and we had some things go really well, and a few things we learned that we would do differently next time, but overall the trip was a huge success.

We had planned to return to Port Hardy again this year as that was some of the best fishing I’ve ever experienced in the salt for king salmon, but due to the border closure, we couldn’t make it up there. So I planned this last-minute “plan B” trip that may end up not being so plan B next year!

We arrived late Monday evening at Mason’s Olsen Resort in Sekiu (love this place!).

We set up our awesome Kodiak Canvas tent and launched the boat to get one of the last mooring spots available in the Marina.

This was important since all week there would be a low low tide early in the morning, so launching would have been a pain.

We fished with downriggers when targeting king salmon, basically the entire time. Check out our page devoted to the topic of downrigger fishing for king salmon if you want more background on the technique.

Tuesday morning it was go time! We got out there to find an active ebb, so we fished the sea caves a bit, before picking up and running halfway to Pillar Point and trolling back until we ran out of current and started trolling with the flood.

We caught lots of undersize and a few coho, but finally hooked up on this nice 14 lb king to start the trip! Overall fishing was slow, and my friend Robert of Goodyear Water Damage was feeling a bit nauseous from the swells.

They were about 5 ft at 8 seconds, and if you know the area around Slip Point it’s every bit of that when traveling through.

We got off the water pretty early and had an early dinner with the thought of jumping back on in the evening as we heard the evening bite had been decent. We also heard from a local at dinner that the Pillar Point area had been putting out some crab.

If you know Sekiu, the wind really picks up in the afternoon, but will sometimes take a break in the evening. So we thought, sure let’s run down to Pillar, drop a pot, and troll back with the evening flood. Kind of not our best idea…

We ran out of flood current after about an hour of trolling back from Pillar Point and hadn’t really made much headway back to Clallam Bay. We did hook and lose a nice fish just west of Pillar Point though.

We had to pick up and run (crawl?) back as the wind had picked up and it got kind of nasty out there for my 20 ft jet boat. Slip Point was a flat-out mess. We were happy to be back but we were not excited about the thought of going back there to retrieve our crab pot…

Wednesday promised a much flatter swell and a zero-wind window until about noon. One of the things I love about Sekiu is you can just troll your way out of Clallam Bay around the corner to the Sea Caves on an ebb and never get on the main motor.

We did this during the barely any light part of the morning.

I had just set my downrigger depth to about 35 ft in 50 ft of water. After looking at a few other things for a few seconds, I look back and my rod is dancing for some reason… I pick up the rod and it’s fish on!

Robert must have missed netting this fish like 8 times because he couldn’t see it and didn’t want to knock it off the line. Somehow after one of those “way too long fights around the boat”, we got it in the net and it was a nice 12 lb hatchery fish. Kind of a miracle we landed this fish as I’ve lost so many fish at the boat once the missed net stab climbs over 3+. This of course gave me the opportunity to provide much ribbing.

What would a fishing trip be without making fun of a friends netting job though right?

After spending a bit longer around the sea caves we ran up to Neah Bay and gave Wadaah Island a good go, where I had previously caught that 21 lb fish during the opening week in July.

After nothing east of Wadaah, it was time to head west across Neah Bay, but not before we caught a 12 lb ling right at the Wadaah Island point in the tide tips off salmon trolling gear. I love catching lings and bottom fish while trolling for salmon! It’s like that little extra bonus.

We ran out of ebb current, so we ran up closer to Tatoosh Island and started trolling with the flood tide. This is when the magic started to happen.

There are a lot of boats that fish deep water when it comes to king salmon. Look I get it, you have a good shot at catching coho out there, and in the interior of Puget Sound, there are often lots of kings suspended in deep water. But when you target these king salmon out closer to the ocean, they are often so easy to catch off the beach, and close in around structure such as points and steep drop offs.

Intuitively, I’ve always been a structure guy when it comes to fishing for any species of fish. If my choices are fishing open water or fishing structure, I will always feel better fishing structure. And these instincts take me to 50-90 ft of water when trolling for king salmon, almost by default.

We started hooking 2-3 fish on every pass with the flood current doing this method. We would come back to the dock with our limits of kings and people would be like “Where did you catch those?”.

While we were out there though, nobody was doing our program. They were all fishing deeper and complaining about having to get through all the coho to get kings.

The other issue with this deep-water fishing is that Marine Area 4 had a tight coho quota. If we caught the coho quota, the whole area would close for both kings and coho. This is exactly what happened as sport anglers left about two 65% of the king salmon quota on the table.

It is more work to fish close in. You cannot just set your gear at a preferred depth and troll in a straight line. Twice we hit rocks with our downrigger balls, but we didn’t lose them. You also don’t need to troll the very bottom. You can be within 10-20 ft and still hook lots of fish.

The other thing I do when fishing close in is use the Navionics app on my phone while I’ve got sonar up on my Raymarine unit. Looking at the charts on my phone helps me avoid shallowing up too fast and allows me to perfectly follow a contour line.

I also recorded my first two successful troll paths hooking fish and then I just followed those exact paths over and over again, hooking fish after fish.

What an incredible few days of salmon fishing!

What gear were we using? Quite simple actually. For flashers, we were just using the blue and green crush Coyote flashers.

We were also using herring aide coho killers and kingfisher spoons. You need to find these in the offseason though as the herring aide spoons go fast once the season starts. I believe many gear approaches would have worked as ocean fresh kings are pretty snappy.

After four nights of primitive camping, we moved our operation to the Red Lion Hotel in Port Angeles.

What a nice change it was to sleep in a bed! There was also good boat parking in the back of the property.

We took our time getting on the water, got our crab pots down in Port Angeles harbor, and then proceeded to fish all over Area 6 with no success on keeper-sized kings. We didn’t see anyone catch anything either, but somewhere some fish were caught as the creel report revealed later.

We did get a few nice dungees though.

We decided to head back to Neah Bay for the last fishing day of our trip, even though chinook retention east of Tatoosh was closed.

We focussed on bottom fish and just taking in the scenery. We had a harder time getting out there due to the crazy amounts of fog that rolled in, slowing us down while heading out west. Also, Robert didn’t feel great with the 4-foot swells. We figured out his limit is about 3 ft swells.

After catching lots of bass and lings, we decided to beach the boat and have an incredible beach cove cookout that will go down as one of the best meals I’ve ever experienced!

First of all the crab pot meal is my favorite anyways, but having this meal where we did was simply incredible.

We left Sekiu / Neah Bay with our proverbial cup full and overflowing, our coolers full of salmon and bottom fish fillets and with some incredible memories we will never forget.

I will be haunted by the thought of fishing Neah Bay, Cape Flattery, and Tatoosh Island until I get back out there. I’ve fished all over Washington and the PNW, and this is easily in my top 3 favorite places to fish!