Aligned with WDFW Region 5 Southwest WA including Districts 9 and 10. And Counties: Clark, Klickitat, Skamania, Cowlitz, Lewis, Wahkiakum
We are almost to the halfway point of fall 2024, and oh baby, has it been a good one! Fall is my favorite season, largely due to the incredible variety and quantity of opportunities to harvest wonderful food from the land through fishing, hunting, and foraging.
The blog post covers some of my recent highlights fishing, hunting, and foraging, and tries to point you in the right direction if you want to pursue some of these same opportunities.
Let’s get to it!
Fishing for springers on the Columbia River is best described as “grinding” since the bites are often so few and far between. Our season in 2024 was definitely defined by the word grind, however it also made us better spring chinook anglers and this blog post will outline why that is.
Well, I’ve already had my limit of cleaning smelt for 2024, so I won’t be getting in on this next dip opportunity, but I’m excited to see there’s another opener for folks who may have already missed the first one.
The first thing you should know about the 2024 Columbia River Spring Chinook fishing season is that it’s almost here! We’ve had a few chinook go over the Bonneville Dam, and a few reports of chinook caught in the lower river and now is the time to take stock of our gear and make plans to go fishing for the tastiest of all PNW Salmon.
Finally, we have a smelt fishery announcement! I know we’ve had a few in the past several years, but they haven’t been quite the same opportunity as what’s expected this Thursday.
If you’ve tried to plunk for steelhead below the Toutle River confluence with the Cowlitz River, you know that the smelt are in and plentiful.
Let’s review what you need to know to be successful on this smelt fishery opener.
Before the spring and summer salmon seasons get announced on the Columbia we get to review the final tally of the 2023 returns and the 2024 forecast.
Last night was the first of several meetings that included the public, on the topic of the 2023-2024 winter steelhead season for the coastal rivers of Washington. In this blog post I will share what I learned and my overall impression of things.
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.
Every year I have a friend who has fished with me from Arizona for the past 14 years. We’ve done many fisheries all over Western Washington and this year we decided to take on the mother of them all: Buoy 10.
Keep reading to learn why we chose Buoy 10, why you should consider it, and a few lessons we learned as Buoy 10 newbs.
