It’s river chinook time and that means bobber downs!

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.

If you’ve never experienced the joy of standing in a cool river between August and October and hanging onto a rod with a big chinook pulling out line and making blistering runs that make you wonder if they will ever stop, you are missing out!

Heck, if you don’t live in the PNW, this is reason enough to vacation up this way and get hooked! If you follow this blog you know I participate in a great variety of harvest activities to put meat in my freezer, but this experience is the one that got me hooked and it’s still my favorite.

Regardless of your experience level, you’ve gotta start your fishing trip by knowing the regulations of the river you plan to target.

I’ve tried to make this super easy for folks by creating a page per river that has a run of hatchery chinook on it and putting not only the permanent regulations on the page but also a link to the emergency regulations and all the run forecast slides and weekly updated escapement graphs, run timing graphs, etc, so you can do all your trip planning in one location.

In terms of getting rigged up and general river fishing techniques, I’m a huge fan of fishing eggs under a float. I’m not crazy about flossing out chinook salmon as many seem to like doing.

I have quite a big article on how to float fish for salmon, you can checkout here.

You can also take a look at a few videos I’ve made on the the topic below:

I was just out on a local river this morning trying to find some biters that would take my eggs fished under a float.

I fished my usual spot for a few hours, but there was very little going on. However, there were some salmon rolling downstream of where I was fishing.

I’m kind of a sucker for chasing rolling salmon. There are multiple theories as to why salmon will roll or jump, but in general, when I’m fishing closer to saltwater, those rolling fish are telling me “Here I am, fish right here!”

Sometimes when you target salmon further upriver, rolling or jumping salmon aren’t going to bite and should be avoided, but I’m a big fan of chasing rollers on the lower end of a river system.

I couldn’t get these rollers to bite though until I switched to some lures. And of course, as I suspected they were pink salmon and willingly took the jigs and spinners I tossed at them.

I’ve already had my fill of pinks though and they weren’t in thick such that they would be more fun to target specifically on lures, so I decided to move on downriver and check on another location.

I found a nice spot where a few really nice dudes were fishing but hadn’t hooked anything yet that morning. So I decided to avoid the water they were fishing not just out of consideration, but also if people are fishing a certain way or a certain location and not catching, perhaps that’s a clue to change things up.

So I fished some water they weren’t covering…which also happened to be where the salmon were rolling!

I thought these might be pinks, but they weren’t taking my spinners or jigs, and while chinook will often take lures, they are much more willing to take eggs.

So, I went back to the bobber and eggs setup and within a few casts, it was fish on!

A few minutes after that fish was landed and dealt with I had my second fish on the bank and limited!

Neither had any great size to them, but it’s just so much fun to see the bobber go down and the bend in the rod as that chrome, fresh from the recent tide, chinook pulls and battles on the other end of the line.

And this is just the beginning! Not only will the Puget Sound rivers fill with chinook over the next month, but things will get going on the coast as well soon and even sooner if we get some early rains.

Biggest key for catching river chinook

Curing eggs can seem intimidating at first, but it’s not that hard and it’s absolutely critical for hooking a lot of chinook salmon in the rivers.

This Pautke Fire cure for curing eggs, with literally nothing else added will hook a lot of king salmon. If you’ve been catching pink salmon in the rivers or in the salt, you probably have some eggs already, so get them cured up and have a go at some chinook!