08/18/2009

Tides: Low tide is at 5:45 a.m. and high tide is at 12:30 and a second low tide at 6:00 p.m.

Crew for the day: Jimmy, Tim and Paul.

Starting Time: 6:30 a.m.

What We Caught

End of day we had 1 12lbs Chinook and 4 Coho ranging from 8lbs to 13lbs.

Where We Fished

We launched at 7:00 a.m. and went directly out to buoy #10, setting up on the Washington side about 100 yards above the buoy. The tide was still slightly outgoing so trolling was a bit dicey for the first hour. We released 2 wild fish in the first hour and only saw about 6 other fish boated. We started having some fairly consistent take downs between 8:30 and 9:30 but were not able to keep anything on. Judging from the size of the other fish being boated around us, these were all probably jack Coho. About 9:30 poles started going off in boats all around us. After about 15 minutes, we were setup pretty well on a tide rip and two poles went off, both hatchery in the 8lbs range. We let the tide push us back for another 30 minutes but everything got quiet. We dropped back down to buoy #27 around 11:00 and setup on a trolling pattern about 300 yards from the Oregon shore. We had a fish on every pass, with several take downs but nothing sticking. We had one fish to the boat and when I got it in the net, I saw it shoot through the netting and swim off. When I checked the net, I found a bad spot that the fish hit just right and tore through leaving a larg hole. Around 12:00 we finally started to put fish in the box.

How We Fished

My new 10 1/2 ft rod wound up catching most of the fish with the hot rod from yesterday only catching a few fish. We were catching the majority of fish at 26 pulls, 42ft on the line counter.

What We Saw and Learned

Not a whole lot of Chinook running yet and Coho started getting a bit bigger as the day progressed. I dropped down to 3/0 hook size to run fresh bait and was able to plug cut these tiny little things (not much larger than red label) and get them to roll correctly.