I’ve missed a good chunk of August already due to fishing in Port Hardy for a week and trying to play catch-up on my return.
The peak fishing in the South Puget Sound has occurred over the past few weeks and should continue into this week. This post is more of a summary and run down of the opportunity in this coming week.
As of this writing, the two northerly areas for Chinook Retention, MA9, and MA10 are now closed. MA11 is nearly at its quota and may have until mid or end of this week left. MA13 will continue to provide opportunities regardless.
One of the best opportunities to connect with Salmon right now, is MA11, trolling from Dash to Redondo. We went out Saturday on what was one of the busiest days I’ve seen at the Point Defiance public ramp. We arrived before sunrise to see around 75-100 rigs already parked!
One of my favorite parts about launching from PD is that you can start trolling like 50 yards from the dock. As we left the dock, we headed right, just after clearing the no wake area and fished the slag pile for a short while.
We saw one fish get netted just as we showed up, but it was pretty dead after that. We messed around off of Owen Beach for an even shorter time and then picked up and ran to Brown’s Point.
That’s probably one of my favorite local beach areas that is not quite combat fishing. There are quite a few folks there, but it’s not quite elbow-to-elbow. Action looked dead at Brown’s and we had the ebb tide start to pick up, which helped us continue our troll to Dash Point.
It was just north of Dash Point that we started to hook into salmon.
We were running 4 rods on the boat for the 4 of us that were there that day. I have two downriggers, and I also ran 2 Deep-six diver rods.
One of the tricks you learn from dragging leads around the Columbia is how to run a bunch of rods and not tangle. The trick to doing this with divers and downriggers, or lead, is you want your heaviest weights on the outside and your lighter stuff directly behind the boat.
Even if that means using a mid-boat rod holder and running a rod out the back that crosses over your downrigger rod, that’s ok. I will have to take a pic of this next time we do it, so it’s clear what we are doing.
The other trick to this is that when you turn, do not go as hard on the throttle. If you let off or pulse the throttle while you turn, your deep-six diver rods will go shallower in depth and your downrigger balls will run deeper as there is less blowback on the wire, and thus you can avoid a nasty tangle, even if you run your downrigger wire a bit shallower.
One of the important things with Deep-six divers is to make sure the release screw is not too tight. You want it to trip when a fish takes your offering.
If it doesn’t trip, you will lose about 3 of every 4 fish you hook. We had this thing too tight and we didn’t realize that’s what was going on, so we actually lost 3 of the fish we hooked that day due to this before we figured it out.
Pretty frustrating. Finally, I hooked up on my downrigger rod and I felt a nice fish, perhaps a king or coho. The fish swam into one of our diver lines and promptly got off. This is one of the disadvantages of running lots of gear if you cannot get it out of the water fast enough. We did hookfish on every rod we had out though.
As we neared the end our abbreviated trip, we decided to pickup our gear and run the rest of the way towards Redondo and we stumbled upon a massive school of pinks, with maybe some coho sprinkled in.
We lost our 5th fish when my buddy wasn’t watching his downrigger rod during a bite that lasted about 3-4 seconds. I vowed to next time pick up the rod and get that fish hooked up!
The 6th fish we lost was just a standard, barbless hook, “what do you do situation” on one of the deep 6 diver rods. Our 7th though was just the icing for the day. The diver rod went off again and we had that thing to the boat, but we had a netting issue and we lost yet another one.
If you’re not laughing you’re crying!
When we arrived at the dock at about 10:15 am, about 5 fish had been checked in at PD. I heard that by about 3 pm, it was maybe 15 fish. If you are going out of PD and just want to connect with some fish, it may be worth it to head to Dash / Redondo vs Troll over the suspended lock jaw kings off of Clay Banks with 100 other boats.
Where are we at though in the South Sound Salmon fishery? We have decent numbers of fish at the Voights Creek Hatchery on the Carbon River, and lots of Kings in the Puyallup already. This run is peaking and has another week in the salt before it will start to decline. Metabolically, you can tell most of these fish have mostly shut down from biting in the salt.
Minter Creek has a decent number of fish back as well. If I wanted to focus on kings in MA11 before it closes, I would be hitting Point Evans down near the Narrows and the Gig Harbor Shoreline north.
You will also be intercepting Nisqually fish and Deschutes bound fish even further deep into the South Sound. The Nisqually run in the river is still building, it needs another week and then it will start to peak as well. That run can be good into mid-September in the salt.
In terms of techniques, you have to consider slowing it down, scent, and bait with all of your presentations. Hoochies or Ace High Fly’s with herring strips on pro troll flashers with agitator fins, so you can get good rotation at slower speeds. Have a look at this link for more information on techniques for South Sound Salmon.
Consider jigging or power mooching cut plug herring as well in areas where fish may be stacked in the staging areas before they head upriver.
Tired of dropping downrigger balls on fish? Our next few months we will be pretty focussed on kings in the river tossing eggs under a float and also spinners. The action can be epic! Good luck out there.