Steelhead Fishing w/ Roe

Steelhead Fishing w/ Roe

12 RULES OF EFFECTIVE SALMON FISHING

Rule #1
Prepare your tackle and boat before going on the water. Rods should be rigged and hootchies, flies and other lures attached and ready. Boat batteries should be fully charged and, if possible, gas the boat the day before.

Rule #2
Pay close attention to the tides. The best tides have a 3 to 7 foot change. Small tidal exchange areas are the best fishing. With big tide and wind the baitfish hide in the relative calm of kelp beds or very deep in the water.

Rule #3
Fish hard during the peak times, one-hour before-through-after tide change. Dont be tying lures, changing areas or eating lunch during peak time. In the summer, early in the morning or late in the evening are peak times.

Rule #4
Use all the information you can get. Examples are: boat house information, maps and charts, electronics, etc. Watch for birds especially in the winter. The Rhinoceros Auklet will almost always be on top of bait. Other birds in the area will be Seagulls, Common Marine and Ancient Murrelets.

Rule #5
Fish with or across the tide flow, never against it. Salmon face into the tide flow and have a better look at your lure as its coming towards them.

Rule #6
Stay in the area you catch fish or see fish caught.

Rule #7
Dont fish only where there are other fishermen (i.e. famous hot spots). Salmon are around bottom structures or bait. Its better to fish by yourself for ten salmon on a reef, than to fish for two hundred salmon along with 4,000 other anglers.

Rule #8
Explore but learn to fish three areas extremely well then expand your areas by one new area per year.

Rule #9
Use a lure that has sight, sound and smell. Use any color, as long as it is green. The colors that show up the deepest water are greens, blues and blacks. All glow lures glow green. In addition, the new Ultra Violet colors can be added to your tackle box, as they show up at all depths. While we can't see UV colors, salmon see them very well. Use flashers or rattle plugs to create sound. Add scent to your lure, such as Smelly Jelly or other products.

Rule #10
USE COLORS! In the top fifty feet of water use any color. Below fifty feet try blue, green, purple, UV and glow lures. The exception to the rule; use white plugs for mature summer Kings. In Puget Sound, plankton absorb the colors of reds, yellows and oranges. By the time these colors reach 50 feet, they have pretty much turned gray and disappeared from the sight spectrum of the salmon. Two species of salmon do see reds, yellows and oranges better. These are Humpies and Sockeye.

Rule #11
When using bait check your bait every 15 minutes. Remember, you only have three hours of premium fishing time. If using lures, be aware of any change in rod tip action and check lure every thirty minutes or if youve bumped the bottom.

Rule #12
Sharpen your hooks and keep them sharp!

KEYS TO JIGGING KING SALMON

Metal jigs--called slab jigs by many coastal anglers--have been producing impressive catches of various saltwater species for decades. British Columbia anglers have been catching salmon on them for a long time, and about 30 years ago Washington salmon fishermen began to figure it out, with equally good results. Oregon anglers eventually caught on, and now jigging is a fairly well-accepted salmon-fishing technique as far south as the northern California coast.

It's easy to understand the growth of the jig fishery for salmon. Most importantly, jigs work! These little slabs of metal are the approximate size and shape of the herring, anchovies and other small baitfish on which Chinook, Coho and other Pacific salmon feed, so if you put a jig in front of a hungry salmon, it's likely to take it for an easy meal. A couple of metal jigs cost about the same as three or four dozen herring, but will last a lot longer, and without the mess or smell of fishing with bait. In areas where spiny dogfish are a problem, jigs reduce--but don't completely eliminate--the problem of dealing with pesky sharks.

Jigging is especially well-suited to fishing for Chinook salmon, kings of the Pacific. Chinook often congregate where baitfish are plentiful and around certain kinds of bottom contours, near-shore structure or in estuaries before ascending their home streams to spawn. Locate these king salmon concentrations with your depth sounder, drop a jig straight down to them and hang on. Kings can often be teased into striking a jig when other methods fail.

And, in these days of tighter salmon-fishing regulations in many areas, jigs make catch-and-release fishing a lot easier. Salmon rarely swallow a jig, so the vast majority of fish are hooked in the jaw, where they can be easily unhooked and released.

While Pacific salmon, especially Chinook, can be very vulnerable to a well-fished jig, some anglers have been slow to accept this relatively new fishing method. Many give it a try or two, fail to figure the basics of good jigging, and go back to trolling or mooching. But with a little patience and a day of jigging practice, anglers who learn the keys to jigging success soon discover that this is one of the deadliest salmon-fishing techniques of them all

First and foremost, the jig has to move. Even with its finely molded form, realistic finish and lifelike detail, a metal jig simply hanging there at the end of the line doesn't look like food to a salmon. Bait, with its natural scent, might draw fish while it's lying more or less stationary, but a metal jig hanging vertically in the water looks to a salmon like a, well, a piece of metal hanging in the water! Move it, though, and it comes to life, and salmon respond accordingly. Successful jiggers stay active, constantly twitching the rod tip, lifting and dropping the rod, reeling and free-spooling line, so that the lure continually "swims" toward the surface and falls back again, resembling the spastic gyrations of an injured or disoriented baitfish. A crippled anchovy, herring or candlefish is an easy mark for a hungry salmon, and that's what a jig looks like if you keep it moving up and down through the water column.

A metal jig is at its fish-catching best when it's dropping through the water, not when it's being lifted toward the surface, so it's important to let the lure drop as freely as possible. When all tension is released, metal jigs flatten out into a horizontal posture, where they vibrate, wobble and dart erratically as they plummet toward bottom. If you keep tension on the line during the drop, the lure remains vertical and virtually lifeless, so it's very important to "throw some slack" on the downward part of the jigging stroke.

Likewise, allow the jig to free-fall as you're dropping it to the desired depth. Depending on what your depth sounder is telling you about the location of feeding fish, you may want to free-spool the lure all the way down to the desired depth, or, if the fish are scattered, stop it every six or eight feet, giving salmon a chance to hit it before continuing the lure's descent. Whichever way you go, allow the lure to drop rapidly on as slack a line as you can control.

Since the jig is most active as it's dropping, that's when most salmon strike. Unfortunately, these slack-line strikes are among the most difficult in fishing to detect and react to. What that means is that the jigger has to be alert and ready to react at all times. If you feel a "tick" on the line as the lure falls, reel down fast and set the hook hard. If the line goes slack, indicating the lure isn't falling anymore, reel down fast and set the hook hard. If the line angle changes...well, you get the picture. Any of these subtle changes in line tension or direction means a salmon has intercepted the jig on its way down, and when it realizes that it has a mouthful of metal instead of a mouthful of meat, it will start trying to get rid of the bogus meal almost immediately. If you don't react quickly with a hook-set, you'll be too late.

As for a reel, most jiggers prefer revolving-spool models over spinning reels because of the line control they afford. You can quickly clamp down with your thumb on the spool of a revolving-spool reel when you have to set the hook in a hurry, while with most spinning reels you have to engage the bail to gain line tension and set the hook.

Your choice of line also is critical to jigging success. Just like a limber rod, a stretchy line will absorb lots of energy and keep you from lifting and dropping the jig effectively. Line stretch is also a problem in getting a good hook-set in deeper water. For those reasons, most jiggers prefer today's "super" braids for much of their salmon fishing. These low-stretch lines let you move your lure up and down with less effort, set the hook better, and offer the added advantage of small diameter and therefore less line drag in the water.

A metal jig will look like the real deal if you're working it the way you should, but it doesn't hurt to make it smell real, too, so use scent on your jigs. The jelly or past type scents work best because they don't wash away like liquid scents do. Besides adding a "realistic" scent to your jig, scents also help to mask the human scent, which can be a real fish turn-off.

Your choice of rod, reel and line will play a big part in your jigging success. Pick a rod that's long and stiff enough to lift and drop your jig when you lift and drop your arm. It sounds simple enough, but many anglers start jigging with a rod that's way too limber, so that when they flail up and down with their arms, trying to work the jig up and down, the soft rod absorbs all the energy, flexing and straightening while the jig remains motionless. A stiffer rod of 7 ½ to 8 feet also gives you more leverage when the time comes to set the hook on a salmon that may be down there 100 feet or more. Berkley's AIR IM7 model A92-7'9" HB is, as far as I'm concerned, as close to a perfect salmon-jigging rod as there is, and it retails for only about $80.

Because even the most stupid salmon realizes its mistake the second it chomps down on a metal jig and starts immediately trying to spit out its mistake, needle-sharp hooks are a must. If you keep hook points sticky-sharp, they'll penetrate that fraction of an inch that will keep them in contact with fish flesh until you can get around the burying the barb for keeps. Salmon will use the weight of the jig to help shake a dull hook in less time than it takes to tell about it. Carry a good hook file and use it every time you bring a jig to the surface.

There's no such thing as the perfect metal jig for all conditions, so carry a selection of sizes and change as the situation dictates. These lures should be fished pretty much straight up and down for best results, and you'll need a heavier jig to get straight down when the wind or current is moving you along at a good clip. On the other hand, if you go to a smaller diameter line or as the water calms, you may reach greater depths with lighter jigs. A lighter lure is generally more active, so you should use as light a jig as you can get away with, as long as it will reach the desired depth.

Just as you should go to lighter or heavier jigs depending on conditions, you should also change your jigging stroke according to changing conditions. You will, for example, need a longer jigging stroke to breathe life into a jig that's 150 feet below the surface, but if you use that same stroke in only 40 feet of water, you'll probably be moving the lure too much, and may actually be pulling it away from interested salmon. Shorten the stroke as you fish closer to the surface, and always be willing to experiment if your "normal" jigging motion isn't paying off. There are simply times when salmon want the lure moving faster, slower, farther or not so far.

SIX TRICKS FOR FALL COHO

As summer gives way to fall here in the Pacific Northwest, the dependable Coho that used to bite so well when they were out and in open water often get harder and harder to catch. Anglers are in general agreement that the good ol' Coho can sometimes be the most cooperative fish in the sea, even suicidal in its efforts to gulp anything with a hook attached. Unfortunately, that user-friendly attitude tends to disappear, as mature silvers get closer to the gravel beds, hatchery ponds or net pens where their lives began.

As spawning time approaches, mature silvers become a whole lot less interested in food, and anglers may have to dig deeper into their bag of tricks to keep catching them. Here are a handful of little gimmicks tricks you may try if you want to continue catching mature Coho from our inshore waterways and estuaries this fall.

1. GET SNEAKY

Coho tend to get more and more paranoid about baits and lures as they run out of vertical space. Even though they may live most of their natural lives in the top 20 feet of the water column, they get increasingly spooky when the water depth is only 20 feet from top to bottom, and their typical recklessness gives way to some instinctive fear of everything having to do with those of us holding fishing rods.

Boats seem to have a significant impact on a fall Coho's sense of security, so try to avoid running over them as you fish. If, for example, trolling is your thing, fish a much longer line than you would earlier in the season; giving wary fish more time to settle down after your boat passes by. It's a given that hooking and landing a wildly jumping Coho is more difficult when you're fishing 150 yards behind the boat than when you're fishing only 50 yards of line, but that longer line just may be the difference between hooking and not hooking fish in the first place.

If you're a boat fisherman who likes to cast spoons, spinners or jigs for your fish, consider using a longer rod and lighter line to increase your casting distance. Getting that lure a few yards farther from the boat may spell the difference between success and failure. Better yet, if you can do so safely and without trespassing, beach the boat and cast from shore. Strange as it may seem, simply getting the boat out of the water and walking up the beach a few yards has paid off for me on several occasions.

I have a friend who takes the sneaky thing farther than most, and I've seen the results. He fishes in camouflage, stays back several feet from the water and keeps as low a profile as possible while casting for wary silvers. As you might guess, his favorite fishing days are the cloudy, rainy and windy ones, when the water's surface is choppy and visibility is low.

2. TEASE 'EM INTO STRIKING

Waiting for "the bite" to occur with fall Coho could result in a very long wait, so you'll probably have to do something to provoke them into striking.

As a general rule, smaller baits and lures work better than larger offerings, since these fish are no longer into filling their stomachs. Two or three-inch plug-cut baits or cut spinners work a lot better than the four or five-inch stuff that produces during summer. Try to keep both the baits action and the trolling pattern as erratic as possible by speeding up, slowing down, lifting and dropping the rod tip and changing direction frequently. All of these things may provoke Coho strikes when a routine, rhythmic bait action won't.

This is the time of year when artificials become a very important part of the Coho angler's arsenal, especially weighted spinners and horizontally fished metal jigs. The flash of a smoothly revolving spinner blade can be irresistible to a mature silver, especially if you vary the retrieve speed and experiment to find the size, style and finish they happen to want that day. I've had days when they've hit nothing but a Vibrax with a silver blade and blue body on one beach, then moved a few hundred yards to another beach where the only thing they'd take was a quarter-ounce Bang-Tail in a black scale finish.

3. TRY HORIZONTAL JIGGING

The metal jigs that catch salmon when you fish 'em up and down through the water column also are effective when worked near the surface in a lift-drop-retrieve technique that I like to call "horizontal jigging." The time-proven Buzz Bomb (see related article on this site) is the traditional lure of choice for this kind of fishing, and certainly one of the best, but it's not the only one you can use effectively. Any of the baitfish-imitating jigs (in smaller sizes and lighter weights so they don't sink too quickly) will entice fall silvers from their shallow-water environs.

The horizontal jigging technique is simple as long as you remember that a free-falling jig is the key to success. Cast as far as you can, allow the jig to drop several feet, and then retrieve it in a series of lifts and drops. Retrieve line on the lift, and then drop the rod tip sharply, allowing the lure to sink two to four feet on a slack line. Jigs draw strikes when they're falling, and they won't fall freely on a tight line, so the quick and pronounced drop is the most important part of the jigging stroke. If your jig of choice is a Buzz Bomb or one of the other free-sliding styles, remember to use the rubber doughnut or some other soft bumper between the lure and the hook to help prevent knot damage when using light line for longer casts. And, whatever jig you use, keep the hook point needle-sharp.

4. FISH HARD DURING THE FLOOD

When your schedule allows, concentrate much of your fishing effort during the flood tide. Fall silvers tend to be more active and sometimes more eager to take baits and lures as the water rises. It's especially true if you're looking for silvers in the shallow estuaries and small bays of central and south Puget Sound, but often applies as well in the deeper, more open waters of the north Sound and eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca. My idea of a perfect day to prospect for fall fish is a day when I can launch on a low slack at daylight and fish an incoming tide the first few hours of the morning.

5. SCRATCH THE SURFACE

Skipping a fly along the water's surface is a time-proven Coho-catching technique in the waters around Neah Bay, but few Coho anglers ever resort to fishing surface lures anywhere else in the Northwest. Well, it's worked for me a few times, and I recommend it when all else fails. There are times when Coho will accept-maybe even prefer-a lure fished right on the surface. It's a trick that salmon anglers might keep in mind this time of year, when mature Coho congregate in our estuaries, often jumping and rolling on the surface as if to taunt us, while refusing to touch all the usual salmon baits and lures fished in all the usual ways.

The idea is to fish something that makes a wake, stops and goes, sputters, gurgles, bubbles, pops, or otherwise creates a surface disturbance that will draw the attention of silvers that are at or near the top of the water column. If you can get them to notice something they aren't used to seeing, you just might trigger that instinctive strike response. Remember, these are goofy, unpredictable, close-to-spawning Coho we're talking about, so an unusual lure presented in an unusual way will at times be just what the doctor ordered.

I like "minnow baits," such as the well-known Rapala and similar lures, and some of the cupped-face ones known to freshwater bass anglers as chuggers and poppers, for this kind of top-water salmon fishing. I fish both types of plug the same way, pulling them to me in one- to three-foot surges. Constantly change the retrieve by taking longer and shorter swipes of the rod, some subtle and some more violent, and varying the length of time the lure rests on the surface between yanks from a second or two to as long as 10 or 15 seconds.

6. KEEP MOVING AND KEEP SEARCHING

Coho are on the move this time of year; so don't spend a lot of time fishing where they may have been yesterday or last week. Stay on the move until you find fish. There's a better-than-even chance that yesterday's productive spot won't be productive today, and you may have to prospect for new places to fish every day. Keep in mind that new runs of fish are moving in from the Pacific all the time, so remember to prospect farther "inside" for fish that that have passed by, and "outside" for fish that are still headed your way. Being mobile, of course, is much easier for boat anglers, but shore and dock fishermen also should have several options in mind with each new day of salmon fishing.

And, while you're moving, keep an eye peeled for signs of Coho activity. Whenever I'm fishing for silvers I'm watching the surface for birds (especially Bonaparte gulls), bait, and jumping or boiling fish. I know some people like to believe that jumping Coho aren't biters, but that's really just a handy excuse for not being able to catch them. When I see Coho jumping-especially when there are lots of them jumping in shallow water-I fish 'em until I figure out what they'll hit or until they quit jumping and go away.

Summer Chinook Info

While Chinook that are still "pasturing" out in the open ocean may feed and chase bait throughout much of the day and throughout much of the water column, the species' feeding habits become more selective and the places they feed more limited as fish mature and move toward the freshwater streams of their origin. As these fast-maturing adult Chinook become more interested in reaching their final destination than in eating, catching them becomes more and more challenging. This principle applies to adult Chinook entering the estuaries of the California and Oregon coasts, just as it does in the so-called "inside" waters of Washington's Strait of Juan de Fuca and northern Puget Sound.

With mature Chinook that are moving toward their home streams, the bite for an entire day may last five minutes, 15 minutes, maybe as long as two hours if you're really lucky, so being in the right place when it happens is critical to success.

One of the "right times" to fish for kings is early morning. Northwest salmon anglers, for the most part, know that king salmon usually bite best at daylight, but many aren't in a position to fish at those times. Just launching your boat at first light isn't the same as being in your fishing spot with baited hooks in the water at first light.

Well-known Northwest salmon-chaser Tony Floor likes to tell the story about how being on the water early put him in position to boat the biggest king of his life. "It was a 53-pounder, and I hooked it as the very first hint of pink was beginning to show on the horizon; the rest of the sky was still dark," he says. It's a safe bet that many salmon anglers were just launching their boats or motoring out of the harbor as Floor slid the net around his trophy-class king.

Longtime Seattle Post-Intelligencer outdoor writer Blaine Freer liked to quote "Haw's Law" in describing the importance of fishing for Chinook salmon during that all-important first crack of dawn. Frank Haw was a former Washington Department of Fisheries biologist and Northwest salmon-fishing guru, and his law, as espoused by Freer, was "If you can see the bait, it's too late." It doesn't get much simpler than that; if you're just hitting the water at daylight, you've already missed your best opportunity of sinking the hook into a big Chinook salmon. You should be baiting your hooks in the dark in order to take full advantage of those first few precious seconds of daylight.

By now you're probably starting to realize that if you're a late sleeper, you're usually going to miss your best chance of the day to put a bragging-size king in the boat. The good news is that first light isn't your only chance. Tide changes during the day also spur Chinook salmon feeding activity, as does the day's second low-light "magic hour," just before dark.

"If you don't score during the morning bite, your best shot at getting Chinook to bite is fishing the tide and current change," says Floor. "The best time is when the current begins to slow and change, on either side of the tide (ebb or flood). The length of time for this bite will vary depending on the extent of the tide and the geography."

Tide changes draw baitfish together in tight concentrations, and where baitfish congregate, adult Chinook come to feast!

The best combination of tide and time depends on where you're fishing, but a current speed of about one knot is ideal. Stronger current makes it more difficult to fish effectively.

Some salmon anglers believe a flooding tide offers the best chance for Chinook, others swear by the ebb, and both are right. It depends on where you're fishing.

Understanding the geography is the main thing. You have to know how the bait reacts to the moving water on which tide. With rare exceptions, you want to fish downhill with the current, going deeper as the water moves you along. Whichever tide carries you from shallower water into deeper water is usually the best fishing tide in that location.

As a general rule, the time of day they're least likely to bite is when the tide is dead-slack. Baitfish schools disperse when the tide is slack, and so do the salmon.

Luckily for salmon anglers, we can all get our hands on tide and current tables that tell us in advance when these events will happen virtually anywhere we might plan to fish. Unlike salmon fishing, tides and currents are pretty much an exact science, so there's no excuse for not knowing when and where they'll happen on any given fishing day.

The day's last flurry of Chinook-fishing activity occurs during the final hour of daylight, and it may provide fishing that's every bit as good as the early-morning bite. A tide change during the final 30 minutes of daylight can be especially productive. Again, though, that means hanging in there through last light, and being prepared for night-running back to the boat ramp or dock. Be sure your boat and your boating skills are up to it.

The success of early morning and late-evening Chinook anglers might beg the question; do these feeding sprees last through the night? The answer is usually "yes," but few anglers capitalize on the possibilities.

"There's pretty good evidence that those salmon you fish for at last light and again at first light are actively feeding throughout the night," Tony Floor says. A man named Art Gallaghan, who retired from Washington's Department of Fisheries years ago, liked to launch at 8 p.m. and come in about 6 a.m., and he caught fish all night."

If you haven't tried it, though, that kind of fishing is very challenging. You can't see your line angle, so you don't always know where you're fishing or where a hooked fish really is, you can't see fish to net them, can't see that tell-tale twitching of the rod tip on a light strike. That's not to mention the deadheads and other dangers you might encounter when you're out there all alone in the darkness.

There's another aspect of timing that's very important to salmon anglers. Besides being on the water with bait on your hooks at the right times of day, you also have to be fishing the right general areas at the right time of year, and some anglers ignore those details.

"State fish and wildlife agencies along the Pacific Coast have years of statistics that show the timing of various salmon runs through our ocean," Floor says. "For example, populations of Columbia River kings passing through Neah Bay, Washington, peak in July. We also know, on a year-to-year basis, when that trip to Neah Bay is probably going to be worthwhile and when it might not be so good. You have to know the run forecast and how it will affect the fishing. Similarly, 90 percent of the Chinook salmon caught off the SW corner of Vancouver Island are bound for Oregon and Washington, and those runs peak in June. So, be in Tofino in June for some pretty good Chinook fishing.

Such run-size and timing information is available for Chinook runs along the entire coast, and it's a good idea to study several years' worth to see how the patterns emerge.

But don't just start thinking about all this in July to plan your summer fishing trips. Do your homework well ahead of time so that you can time your future vacations and fishing trips for the right places at the right times.

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