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.
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.
I finally got the boat back out on the water to try and get some crab on the last day of the season in Marine area 8-2 near Everett, WA.
Usually, this season remains open through December, but unfortunately this year WDFW announced the closure on Oct 24th. Why did it close early and how did we do?
Salmon for Soldiers is an amazing event where the recreational boating and sport fishing community get an opportunity to give back to the veterans who have proudly served our country. I highly recommend it for anyone with a boat and a desire to give back.
I also highly recommend it for any active duty, returning from deployment, or retired military. Words on a blog post and a few pictures do not adequately describe the range of emotions and the amount of positivity generated at this gathering.
Did summer ever actually happen? Technically, September is still summer, but it sure feels like we are now in the fall. It doesn’t help that all the stores have Halloween stuff out, the autumn beers are on the shelves and the salmon are in the rivers! Let’s cover what the options are in September to get into some salmon.
So you heard the forecasts at the start of the year in the North of Falcon process, Pink Salmon fishing was supposed to be ho-hum this year. I think we can safely conclude that the prediction was a tad conservative.
The salt and now the rivers are stuffed with Pinks. If you read this blog early in the year, you know we predicted this to be the case.