By Wayne Kruse
For the Herald
The stars seem to be aligning for Sunday’s opening of the always popular hatchery chinook season in Marine Areas 9 (Admiralty Inlet)and 10 (Seattle-Bremerton).
“I would be surprised if it wasn’t a very good first few days for that fishery,” said All Star Charters owner/skipper Gary Krein of Everett.
He points to the solid numbers of chinook being hooked incidentally (and released) by coho fishermen in the ongoing catch-and-keep season for hatchery coho and pinks in Area 10; to the smackdown chinook action currently on tap in Marine Area 7, the San Juan Islands; to the unusually good opening for hatchery kings on the Skykomish River, breakin’ rods and kickin’ butt; to a surprisingly good take of summer chinook in the Tulalip Bubble (The bubble? You kidding me?); to reports of adult chinook already showing in the south Sound; and to excellent catches reported from the banks of the eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca.
With chinook surrounding Possession Bar, Midchannel Bank and other north Sound hot spots how can we miss?
OK, there is one small dinger here. Krein, who likes a strong outgoing tide on the west side of Possession Bar, said Sunday’s tide is a poor one. It will be a weak morning flood with a high about 11 a.m. That would make the optimum fishing window, in Krein’s opinion, from a little before 11 a.m. until about 3 p.m.
“I may end up trying Point No Point or Pilot Point instead,” he said. “That’s not an optimum situation for the bar.”
Stay no more than 10 feet off the deck, in 120 to 150 feet of water, using a 4-inch spoon.
If you can find the fish, they will be nice ones, averaging 10 or 12 pounds, with a few in the 15- to 18-pound range.
“Every year a couple of guys end up with a king over 20 pounds from that fishery,” Krein said.
Meanwhile, the hatchery coho season in Area 10 is putting out silvers in limit numbers. These are nice, fat, healthy fish in the 2- to 5-pound range, just crying for a barbecue and, even better, 50 to 60 percent are clipped.
Krein’s been fishing Jefferson Head, but he said you don’t have to run that far south to find good numbers of coho. Drag a Gibbs green flasher, a 3-inch cookies ‘n cream or herring aid spoon, off Edmonds or Kingston, at 35 feet in the morning and down to 60 or 70 feet by mi-day, and hang on.
Baker Lake sockeye
Saturday’s opener of the Baker Lake sockeye season rated a “not too bad” from Kevin John at Holiday Sports in Burlington. He said the catch rate was about a half fish per rod Saturday, and went up to one per rod Sunday. That’s fair to middling considering the relatively small number of fish that had been transferred to the lake at that point from the Baker River Dam collector.
“Actually I was surprised at how good it was over the weekend,” said Brett Barkdull, a Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist. “They probably caught 400 of the 2,100 total in the lake on the opener, and that’s unusual.”
A department creel check Tuesday showed 54 anglers with 34 sockeye, and Barkdull said the run so far was in the range of the preseason forecast.
The rule-of-thumb transfer number for “decent” fishing in the lake is about 3,000 salmon. As of Monday, 2,700 fish had been transferred. If 2,000 more are trapped and trucked by next weekend, fishing should be approaching peak level.
John said the sockeye were scattered throughout the lake — some taken near the dam, others uplake at “the elbow” across from Swift Creek, and several spots in between.
The standard setup is a size “0” big ring dodger with UV finish, 9 to 16 inches of 25- to 30-pound fluorocarbon leader, and two 2/0 red hooks, covered with a pink, orange or red mini-squid, often tipped with a small piece of red-cured prawn.
Salmon new to the lake tend to stay shallow, particularly at the crucial sunrise period. Start near the surface, 10 or 15 feet down, and go deeper as the sun hits the water, to the productive 40-foot level. If you don’t have a downrigger, a 4- to 6-ounce sinker will drop you to where they live, at least for a while in the morning.
And be there early. Very, very early.
Lake Wenatchee sockeye
The state has cut its Columbia River sockeye run forecast in half, from 200,000 fish to 100,000, and the revision has triggered a fishing closure for the small salmon on the Columbia River and some of its tributaries. The Columbia is now closed to sockeye fishing from the Washington/Oregon border upriver to Chief Joseph Dam (above the mouth of the Okanogan), along with the Wenatchee , Similkameen, Okanogan and Chelan rivers.
So, it looks like a pretty sure bet that there won’t be a recreational sockeye season on Lake Wenatchee, right?
Not necessarily, according to state biologist Travis Maitland in Wenatchee.
“It was all gloom and doom after the run-size revision came out,” Maitland said, “but a Lake Wenatchee season really depends on the size of the Wenatchee portion of the run. There have been conflicting estimates on the size of that portion, and nothing is settled yet.”
The major portion of the Columbia sockeye run is usually destined for a big hatchery operation on the upper Okanogan. Maitland said he needs a 23,000-fish spawning escapement, and 25,000-fish total to open any meaningful recreational season.
So that makes counts at Tumwater Dam, on the Wenatchee, crucial. As of early this week, just 30 sockeye had been counted at Tumwater, but Maitland said he thinks the run is late and that there’s still a chance of meeting the numbers.
“I’ll have a better idea by next week, but it’s my gut feeling the run is late,” he said. “Last year we opened July 20, but if this run timing is later, we could possibly open in late July or the first week of August.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
