Aligned with WDFW Region 4 North Puget Sound WA including Districts 13 and 14. And Counties: San Juan, Island, Snohomish, Skagit and Whatcom
Hopefully you are right in the middle of a great run of salmon on your local river as chinook, pinks and coho all steam into streams all over Western Washington.
While, summer seems to have just ended (emphatically) with the latest edition of the atmospheric river arriving this weekend and continuing into next week, it’s never too early to start previewing what we can expect during the 2023-2024 winter steelhead season.
Maybe you’ve already got a full freezer from a successful season of saltwater salmon fishing, or maybe this is your first opportunity to wet a line for chinook. Regardless, angling for chinook in our local or coastal river is my FAVORITE PNW harvest recreation activity and you don’t want to miss out on the fun!
I went out this morning and got my limit in a few hours, so I feel inspired to write about river fishing for Chinook and tell you my story.
As many of you are now aware, we’ve lost most of the fishing opportunities in 2023 to pursue Skykomish summer chinook and summer steelhead returning in the same timeframe.
The Skykomish summer chinook fishery is an incredible opportunity close to home for many folks in the north Puget Sound region represents a massive amount of business for local guides and the surrounding businesses and fills a hole in the fishing calendar.
How did this happen? And what does it mean for the future of this fishery? Let’s explore together using the data available from the North of Falcon Process and the Management Plan for Puget Sound Chinook agreed upon between the Tribes and WDFW.
Like the first gleam of dawn on the Duwamish industrial waterway is the glimpse of summertime fun we just received from WDFW via the North of Falcon Salmon season setting process.
That’s right folks, it’s time to board the hype train to humpy town! Pink Salmon season 2023 is upon us!
Let’s get the full rundown of the pink salmon um…run, in 2023.
This is the big forecast news dump we’ve been waiting for! There’s so much information on what we can expect with regards to salmon fishing in Puget Sound revealed at the beginning of North of Falcon with these forecasts now released.
There was also some framing of the kind of salmon seasons we can expect. I will unpack all of it for you in this blog post, including details about the nearly 4 million pinks (humpies) expected to return to Puget Sound in 2023!
We are about halfway through the month of January, and for many folks, the steelhead season in the state of Washington has been predictably frustrating. However, there are some bright spots you should certainly be aware of and some updates to the content here that I want to highlight.
Historically, the Puyallup and Carbon Rivers are places you can fish 7 days a week for several months of the summer/fall, and thousands of people each year look forward to this wonderful part of the calendar.
However, in 2022 the fishing regulations have changed significantly, limiting how many days a week these rivers can be fished and the months they are open. This blog article gets to the bottom of why things changed.
Screw 2020 and all even years! 2021 is another glorious odd year and that means hordes of Pink Salmon returning to the Puget Sound and the rivers.
While we’ve had some challenging steelhead restrictions to deal with this winter steelhead season, the opportunity still exists to hook into a winter chrome bolt of energy.
We are only a couple of weeks into 2021 and the early winter steelhead season is winding down already. I like to think of the winter steelhead season as broken down into thirds: Early, middle, and late.