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King Salmon Float Fishing Leaders
38K views
Mar 27, 2023
We are about to be chasing king salmon on the coast of Washington State and the PNW and we've already got kings in many interior rivers. This video shows specific details about float fishing leaders used for fishing cured salmon eggs. This video assumes you know some float fishing basics. There's a lot of battles with king salmon, bobber downs and hooksets shown. In the last several minutes of the video, there's a deep dive on how to catch king salmon on eggs in super low visibility water conditions, as you might find in high water situations or glacial / silty rivers. Good luck this season and tight lines!
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0:00
What's up everybody
0:16
NW Best Life with another video here. And as we get ready for Coastal King and Coho fishing season here in the state of Washington
0:26
I want to talk about what you're doing with your bobbler and egg game, your bober game
0:33
and specifically what are we doing with leaders, how to set up leaders for bober fishing
0:41
for king and co-ho salmon, but especially kings where we really target them with eggs
0:48
There's also a lot of kings in Fuget Sound rivers right now, and some of these rivers will have
0:53
pretty low visibility. and I want to give you some ideas and we'll show you some setups to use in different scenarios
1:01
different types of rivers and equip you with what you need to know to have a lot of success
1:07
fishing for king salmon. So here's a few things we're not covering a bunch of float fishing basics
1:12
You're going to want to look at my video on secrets for catching king salmon with bobber an egg
1:19
We're not going to cover curing eggs for salmon. There's other videos out there on that that are fantastic
1:24
Just a second on that though, if you're not curing your own eggs for salmon, you're missing
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out on a tremendous opportunity to catch a lot of king salmon, really up your catch numbers
1:35
and it's really easy to do, you know? It's one of those things where people are like, oh man, you gotta have all this secret cure
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and this egg curing recipe that I'm gonna take into my grave. I get it
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There's some good egg cures out there that people have come up with and there's some guarded
1:49
secrets, but they're only a little bit better than what you can just go by from, you
1:54
your local sporting goods store, commercial cure, slap it on and watch one of the videos on how to do it
2:01
And you're good to go. Maybe add some pro cure sense to it, doctor it up a bit, but come on, it's not that hard
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If you're not, if you're waiting to cure your own bait because you think it's really hard, get off your butt, cure some bait
2:13
It's not that hard. All right, let's look at, let's look at, I'm going to look at three different leader scenarios that you're going to want to use in three different water conditions, right
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I'm going to cover really low visibility, right? Like when we're talking glacial rivers, maybe an inch, two inches of visibility
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We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about your normal scenario for fishing by and egg
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What you normally might want to do with like, you know, decent clarity, not gin clear, but pretty decent clarity
2:46
And then I want to give you a little tip on when water's really clear, there's a few rivers out on the coast
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I don do river naming here other than like the Puyallup or the Columbia or some like super popular rivers everyone knows anyways right No secrets there But I don like naming rivers You mentioned rivers in the comments and spots in the comments
3:09
I'll just delete those comments. It's not cool. So let's get right to it
3:17
Now we have our barometer, brush and tied barter leader, two outhooked, 20 pound test line
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fluoride carbon line. We need to get this thing ready to fish
3:27
one of the challenges with fishing eggs under flow is the eggs are neutral buoyancy right so
3:37
when you splash them down in the water they're not going to immediately sink to the bottom in
3:42
fact if you've got you know your three foot bar leader uh knowing where those eggs are fishing
3:50
in the water column may be a challenge and so in low visibility
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conditions fishing near the bottom knowing where you're fishing is super super
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important and I use these things called bait weights all right Beaumack makes these cheater bait weights size 14 is what I use the color almost
4:16
doesn't matter because you'll knock around on the rocks they'll lose all of their
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paint and they'll still keep fishing fantastic here's one of them up close out of the
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All right, so these little guys. I'll thread that on through the hook here, through the line
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We'll thread that on. Bam. There's the business end of our bobber leader
4:40
And what this does is it makes sure that your eggs are fishing exactly where you think they're fishing
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Right? So as you notice the float tilt forward a little bit, you can adjust your bobber stop down a little bit
4:56
fish a little shallower and know you're right in the zone. Fishing, uh, fishing for kings with eggs
5:03
in like zero visibility water is, is about fishing exactly where you need to be. Uh, and inches
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matter. When I'm adjusting my, uh, barber stop, I am moving it like half an inch at a time
5:17
uh, because I want to be in, in the exact best position to fish, uh, the water in the best way
5:24
So I will use this in higher visibility too, maybe up to a foot, two feet, even three feet
5:30
I'll use bait weights and great success with these things. Adds a little bit of color, a little bit of contrast
5:38
But they can become problematic in some situations, usually with higher visibility
5:45
And so in those situations, the bait weight comes off. And we got another thing
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the old split shot, right? Right? The classic split shot weight And with split shot I will set my split shop split shot up to be right around here right maybe eight inches up the
6:20
leader and now when you're fishing this it just you have a little bit more
6:25
predictability of where your eggs are but make it a little easier to fish, a little more predictable of knowing where your eggs are
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but it's not really affecting the presentation. You don't have a weight right up against the hook
6:40
right? Which might not be appealing for some situations with really good visibility, right? It may
6:48
affect the bite. So you can throw a split shot, you can move it further up the line, right
6:53
Further up the line, maybe a foot and a half, right? And then at some point, you can move it further up the line
7:00
you want to go naked. Just a straight leader. Right? Really high visibility water
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You want to go with this. In fact, there's a river, which I won't mention
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that the number of hookups, I fished by myself, fishing on top of a bunch of big pile of king salmon
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perfect water conditions. Until I remove the split shot, I wasn't getting
7:30
bit hardly at all. Remove the split shot and it was literally every cast, bobber down
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Another concept. In that same river, switching from your typical float, torpedo float to
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one of these clear floats made a huge difference in hookups. Huge difference in hookups. Like
7:48
not like one or two, but like four or five to one using these clear floats. So
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visibility really matters for how you're fishing. for kings with eggs under a flow
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I want to put a twist on fishing, uh, fishing low visibility water
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Like water that people will tell you, oh, kings won't bite in this water
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There's no visibility. This is a flossing, a flossing show only. I'm here to tell you
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Uh, kings will absolutely bite in almost zero visibility water. There's a few things you have to do differently
8:28
All right. Number one tip for, catching more kings in really low visibility water is use big clusters of eggs that are wet
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and giving off a lot of scent. It's going to, by far that's the biggest thing
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I'm more talking like golf ball size, silver dollar size, clusters of eggs
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Now, this little dime stuff and this little steelhead stuff using big, big clusters of
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It gonna be super important for getting these kings to go helping them smell it find it and bite it Alright tip number two use one of these bait weights It super important that you fishing right where you need to be
9:14
which is just up from the bottom. These fish and low visibility, they're hugging the stinking bottom
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Use a bait weight. Look at your float when you're fishing it. Find bottom, come up like an inch, and you're in the money
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You're in the zone. Batweight's going to help you do that. Tip number three, it's about fishing in less water, right
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It's about reading the water, knowing where the fish are. You get to pick where in the river you're going to fish
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When there's lots of public access, you get to pick. You want to pick a part of the river that fish are traveling through or holding in
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that is smaller than the full river size. Unless you're fishing a really small river, you want to put the odds in your favor
10:03
I can find a place where perhaps the river has an island in the middle of there's a fork
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and the kings prefer one side or the other. That's what I'm looking for
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If there's a one of these like mini like waterfall situations where there's only one
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one part of the channel, right, where they're going to go up and the rest of it's too shallow
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I'm going to fish near the head of that. And in fact, you can see it here in this footage
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It's exactly what I'm doing on this river and finding a pile of kings that are moving through
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And then lastly, you want to find slow enough moving water. If your float is just screaming down the drift, you may get a hookup or two, but it's going to be tough
10:51
You're not giving the fish much reaction time. But if you can find a spot that is all of these things combined, slow moving, half the water
11:00
fishing it perfectly, using a bait weight, right above the bottom, big chunks of eggs
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you're going to get some hookups. Hell yeah. Big, big, big, big hand, yeah
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Nice job. Thanks. I'm going to release it. Well, it's a female
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It's going to be pretty. Pretty white. Yeah, look at the eggs are like coming out
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Yeah. Yeah, that's nice fish. I've had probably some of my best days
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fishing for king salmon anywhere in zero visibility rivers. Hopefully this helps you, equip you
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punch that like button, subscribe to the channel. There's lots more coming
11:58
Probably next video is going to be on code. and some of the cool techniques there for chasing coho
12:04
So lots more to come. Have a good one. Tight lines. See ya
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