“That’s why they call it fishing” a statement often issued after a difficult fishing trip, or maybe during chinook season when things don’t always line up to put fish in the box.
What’s going on right now in Puget Sound though is called catching!
The sheer numbers of pinks and coho throughout the interior marine areas of Puget Sound is simply staggering and for most, that’s translating to incredibly good fishing or “catching”.
I recently took a group of mostly newbie saltwater salmon anglers out on my boat near the end of August on Marine Area 10 (the Puget Sound waters around Seattle / Bainbridge Island).
We caught our boat limit of coho in about 30 minutes! In fact, as we were trolling north with the ebb tide, north of Meadow Point, we kept catching coho after coho after coho.
If you know the regulations in Marine Area 10 during this period, we are limited to 1 coho a piece and 2 salmon total which means, with no chinook retention allowed, 1 pink is the only alternative.
At one point one of the anglers onboard exclaimed “Man, where are the pinks!”. I had to chuckle at that because, what pink year near the end of August is anyone lamenting a lack of pinks, yet that’s how good the coho bite was at that moment!
If you want to know what we were doing, we were trolling north with the ebb in 280 to 500 ft of water, fishing 35 ft and 44 ft down on the wire about 3-3.5 mph (including current speed which was about .5 at the time).
We were trolling with a Goldstar Cookies n’ Cream spoon 42″ of 25 lb fluoro behind a Gibbs Bonchovie flasher rigged with a Coldwater Strong flasher release (makes the fight way more fun!) on one side.
If you follow this blog very much you know the above setup is simply one of the best combinations out there, and for coho, I’ve never found something that out-fishes it!
You can use all kinds of different combinations to get it done, and finding the “best” combo doesn’t sell much tackle, but I’m pretty convinced at this point that I don’t need to screw around with much else.
And on the other side, we had a purple haze Ace High Fly 30″ of 40 lb fluoro behind a purple haze flasher also rigged with a flasher release and a small fillet of herring in the bait loop knot.
Also a great setup, but was out-fished 3 to 1 by the aforementioned “best” combo.
After cycling through almost a dozen of these chrome ocean coho we decided to go looking for pinks. I had to go to the place I last caught the crap out of them which was West Point on the north end of Elliot Bay.
No sooner had we dropped our gear down and trolled west of the green buoy, than we got our last couple of pinks and steamed back to Shilshole with our very quick limit of salmon in Marine Area 10.
Throughout the morning, while we were trolling we had fish jumping and rolling constantly, the water was truly alive with so much activity.
My friends really couldn’t believe how fast the action was. And we are within a 1-2 week period where we may continue to experience these conditions. As pinks clear out, they will be replaced by the peak of ocean coho in Puget Sound.
If you haven’t got your salmon fix yet out on the saltwater, you simply MUST get out on the water to experience what’s going on right now.
Where can we find a guide to get into this action? Thanks
I would look up Best Seattle Fishing – Cary Hoffman or All Star charters, there’s a bunch of charters who fish the Puget Sound, but not sure who will still have availability this late into the season.
West Point is on the north end of Elliott Bay, where the sewer treatment plant is. You trying to fake us out?
Ah, my bad, I was thinking south end of Shilshole and got my lines crossed. Thanks for catching it, I fixed it!
Great fishing and all but it’s a bit misleading to talk about limiting out when the limit is one or two fish.
Limits in the saltwater around Puget Sound have been 2 salmon for years…there are a few a exceptions to that…but chinook limits have been 1 as well. Sometimes it’s not just about the meat, and independent of how many fish you can take home, the catching is truly exceptional right now.
Can you explain more what you mean by trolling speed of 3-3.5 mph including current speed of .5 mph? And, how are you measuring the current speed?
So…current speed changes throughout a fishing trip, but I like to try to understand a few different ways.
1. Pre-trip research is usually possible in most places throughout Puget Sound on an app like Navionics or looking at the tide table and having an educated guess
2. One of the first things I do when I get to the spot I’m going to start trolling is go to neutral and wait until the only thing moving me is the current. Look that on your electronics, how fast are we moving?
3. Pay attention throughout the day, for the same wire angle, are we going the same speed? Speeding up, slowing down, changing current direction? Potentially repeat #2, but usually I have a pretty good feel for it by this point and can adjust trolling speed accordingly.