Snagging Salmon

Driving back from my morning elk hunt, I saw a couple of rigs parked next to Young’s Bay, just a half-mile or so from Astoria. I’d seen a few trucks and cars parked there over the past few days and figured that something good must be going on. I pulled over on the gravel beside the highway and walked across the road.

Peering between the two parked trucks, I saw an angler holding a markedly bent fishing rod! “Any luck?” I asked, already pretty sure of the answer. The smiling fisherman looked up, painfully aware that he was going to have trouble lying to me with a flopping fish on the bank in front of him. “Well, we are catching a few,” he admitted grudgingly.

Actually, he’d done a lot better than that. The shiny fish that he flipped into his bucket had just finished off his limit. Five chunky jack salmon, silvers between 19 and 21 inches, would very nicely validate a great hour of fishing beside the highway!

Sophomore Salmon
Salmon are wonderfully adaptable fish, and this little fishing opportunity bore witness to that fact. The little coho salmon, second-year males that help ensure the survival of the run, were available in abundance. Most of the fish spawn in their third year of life—these are the adults, usually between six and 12 pounds, that fishermen like to target.

But some years there are problems with the runs (the eruption of Mt. St. Helens was a good example), so Mother Nature builds a little fail-safe into the system by sending up a few extra males to ensure that eggs get fertilized.

But these little silvers had been messed around with by man as well as nature. Raised in net pens that were suspended in the waters of Young’s Bay, they were much cheaper to raise and had a better survival rate than fish from upstream hatcheries. Nets are easier to set up than cement ponds, and salmon get used to the brackish tidewater that will be their home until they head out to the ocean. They get a chance to snack on native bits of plankton that might wash through their net homes, and they even have to dodge a few predatory birds that might try to grab them through the mesh.

One problem, however, is that they may not know which streams they should call home. While some go up the rivers that feed the bay, and many, as planned, are caught by the gillnet fishermen who paid for their room and board, a good number just mill around the bay looking for some place to spawn. These jacks were splashing around in front of a tide gate that drained a few acres of fields that border the bay!

Quick Catch
Next morning I put away my bow, and was standing on the bank as the tide brought in the school of little salmon. I was using a bobber with a small shrimp suspended below. Fish were jumping all around as my bobber was jerked below the waves. I slammed up the rod tip and soon had quite a battle. In a couple of minutes I brought a nice fat jack up on the beach, and before the hour was out, my limit was filled. After a couple of lousy fishing seasons, this was really picking up my spirits!

The jacks also readily hit lures, and I was able to get pretty good action with a small flatfish and a variety of spinners. This was a great fishery for kids, and several fathers brought their youngsters to the quiet waters. The little pool was great for practicing casting and watching bobbers bounce. You had to be careful to keep the kids off the road, but the waters were pretty safe!

For the next week I loaded up on the tasty fish, keeping my smokers and neighbors full. Then, as quickly as it started, the run died off. Rains hit the bay and the fish headed toward more promising waterways. Not a problem. I upped the poundage on my reels and headed upstream. I might get a second chance and should catch a few more, along with their big brothers and sisters.

Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and rvlife.com.