Herring Bytes: Buoy 10 Catching

Today was one of those days I'd only heard about. The kind of day where it should be called catching instead of fishing. The perfect day on the water where nothing goes wrong* and there are so many fish in the river, you're almost hoping for it to slow down so you catch your breath from all the chaos.

Given the strong Coho/Silver Salmon return this year, Fish and Wildlife upped the Coho retention to 3 fish per person within the saltwater of the Columbia River estuary. Although Chinook/King retention is closed in that area, the opportunity to catch a large bounty of the better tasting Coho** makes the long single day trip of fishing the estuary much more appealing (vs. Buoy 10 Fish Camp).

High tide was at 6:09am so Erik and I met at our carpooling rally point at 3:30am and had the boat in the water by 5:30. We had a bumpy, slightly wet, boat ride across the river and up to where I wanted to start following the tide and dropped our lines in calmer waters at around 6:15. What would transpire next was unbelievable fishing excitement and chaos.

For a period of 2 hours, I literally never sat down. I was either cutting bait, baiting hooks, reeling in fish, or netting keepers. By 8:30, we'd gone through nearly 30 plug cut green label herring and hooked into 22 Coho and 2 Chinook (released unharmed). Those numbers average out to a fish hooked about every 5 minutes. If you equate for the fishing time lost to reel in and net or release each fish, those stats translates to some serious non-stop action while lines were wet. There was a time when Erik hadn't even had his bait in the water 15 seconds before getting a fish... LITERALLY!! And another time I got bit reeling in to check/change bait.

The same drill we did last month of dragging 12oz lead on bottom in 28 to 32' of water worked for us but I am not sure how much depth would have mattered. There were just so many fish in the river to worry too much about depth. My go-to flasher I wrote about in my August post once again was responsible for the lion's share of the fish. Again, I am not sure how much it mattered but it's interesting that rod got hit more frequently.

Oh what a sweet ride back to port with a limit of fish and lunch time still several hours away. It's such a relaxing feeling to be done for the day while several other boats are still launching. However, I am still left in wonder at how long that bite could have lasted had we weeded through fish in an effort to keep going. The icing on the cake was seeing a healthy cow elk cross the launch lines at Hammond as we pulled the boat out of the water.