Places to fish, hunt or forage
Marine Area 9 opened up on February 1st for fishing for and retention of a single hatchery chinook 22″ and larger (blackmouth). There were some initial positive reports and lots of “shaker city” kind of reports.
I couldn’t help myself for too long before I had to go out and check things out.
I’ve wanted to get this post up about our Hood Canal Crabbing trip quickly since winter crabbing is closing at the end of this week, but I’ve been waylaid by a virus (probably corona?) that knocked me out the last 3-4 days.
We were only on the water for about 4-5 hours but experienced decent success with keeper crabs. Most of them were Red Rock, but we still got some nice big Dungeness crab sprinkled in the mix.
After all the snow, ice, and wind events we’ve had in the Puget Sound area lately, I finally made it out to fish for Blackmouth in Puget Sound. I had heard some recent good reports in Marine Area 10, so we decided to target fishing near Kingston. Marine Area 10 has been open since the start of the year and has just started to produce Blackmouth.
I finally made it out for a fishing trip after a dry spell of almost 5 weeks! The goal of this trip? Float fishing for steelhead on the Washington coast! In this post, I describe all the details that made this a successful steelhead fishing trip.
Hunting for elk in Utah during winter is an amazing experience whether you get to fill your elk tag or not.
On this Utah elk trip, we ended up with a whole lot of tag soup, but this was largely a factor of the deck not being stacked in our favor.
I’m not always as excited to write about trips that didn’t result in punching tags or fish. However, any hunting trip where you experience the kinds of backcountry views we had, where you learn a lot that can be applied to the next season, and where you stay safe and warm (mostly), is a great trip.
2020 Salmon seasons have been released as the North of Falcon process concludes. While the biggest headline and disappointment is the loss of most of the winter blackmouth season in 2020-2021, it may only be a one year setback. Summer chinook seasons have a slightly higher quota. Everything kicks off on June 1st with the opening of the Marine Area 10 coho season.
My final update to this post is a link to the 2021 Puget sound salmon season post just released.
Puget Sound Crab season extended into 2020. We also recently crabbed Marine Area 8-2 looking for big winter Dungeness crab.
Puget Sound salmon fishing has tailored off significantly as coho runs are fully in the rivers (some runs like the Puyallup are basically over). Chum are now making their way through Puget Sound, but there is some bad news on that front we will dive into.
With several consecutive outstanding razor clam tides on the coast, we wanted to stay a few nights at an RV Park near Aberdeen WA. We ended up finding Hoquiam River RV Park after a brief search.
It’s fall and you might be looking to hit that popular summer hike that you are hoping has less foot traffic on it now. Lake 22 would not be such a hike, but the views and the trail are worth braving the crowds.
As we made our way down, we probably passed 30-40 people and saw another 20 staging near the trailhead with a completely full parking lot by 10 am on a Saturday in late October.