On the High Seas

I was more than a little anxious when I turned my boat downriver, and took it up to cruising speed. The Columbia was calm and the day looked great, but this was going to be my first attempt at taking the vessel over the bar for the ocean fishery.

My boat had been there plenty of times before. The 22-foot Carver, while an older boat built in the ‘70s, was plenty seaworthy. My friend Denny, the previous owner, used to plow out into the Columbia under all kinds of conditions. As his son Jason told me, “Dad would tell us to go down in the cabin, and he’d charge over the bar, water flying everywhere!” But Denny didn’t get seasick, and that is my downfall.

I’d like to do a lot of fishing in my retirement and try several new fisheries. I’d love to head out about 30 miles to chase after albacore in the blue water, maybe even go to Costa Rica to hook billfish. But most of those adventures involve being able to handle the big rollers that are part of the ocean habitat.

The year had been slow in the rivers, and they were catching loads of salmon in the ocean, so I talked my buddy Bill, an expert skipper, into joining my fishing partner, Jim, and me on our trip over the bar. Bill was a gold mine for directions and advice. After all, when one goes over the bar known as the “graveyard of the Pacific,” a little experience is worth having! But I would be doing all the boat operations, so things promised to be interesting.

Smooth Start
The water stayed calm and we easily crossed the bar and headed south toward Seaside. After a couple of more miles we could see a little fleet of sports fishing and charter boats. Bill got the gear ready and we started trolling. The fishing was just as advertised, bite after bite after bite. Fish were everywhere.

Salmon in the ocean can be amazing feeders. In the weeks before they head upriver, they are putting on as much as a pound a week, so anything that gets in their way is going to get eaten. When they head up the river, they strike mainly out of anger or instinct, but in the ocean they feed like crazy. A lot of trips in the Columbia involve a bite or two every hour; out here if we didn’t get a hit in five minutes, we’d check our bait.

It’s a whole different game fishing for them in the ocean in a small boat. We were slipping and sliding around the deck, having to brace ourselves as we handled the gear, fought fish, and scooped them up with the net. Bill, with some thirty years of running charter boats, was a whirlwind—untangling gear, stowing fish, and cleaning the deck, all with an ease and grace more suited for a dance floor than the slimy deck of a sports boat in the middle of a feeding frenzy.

Saving Salmon
Off the Oregon coast, anglers can only keep fin-clipped silvers. Hatcheries clip the adipose fin off of all the silver salmon they release. In an effort to protect some endangered native silver runs, fish with an adipose fin must be released. This is messy business. Anglers try to be very careful to release native fish unharmed, but fish can impale themselves on hooks all the way to their gills, and can lose a lot of scales in the battle.

When we found ourselves in native fish, we pulled up our gear and tried a different spot. Fish seemed to school by streams of origin, so after a couple of moves we were able to get a nice run of hatchery fish to take back home.

Fishing stayed good, but I was starting to fade. Even though I had taken some Dramamine, the rollers were taking me into “flu country.” I managed to play a few fish, but I started getting wobbly just as we landed the last of our limit. The fish weren’t very big, most were about six pounds, but they were certainly on the bite, and that was a big boost for my flagging confidence.

I was more than happy to head back for the river, and started feeling much better when we were in the calm waters. We stopped to pick up our crab pots and snagged a half dozen “bugs” to go with our salmon dinner. Crabbing wouldn’t get really good till later in October, but we were able to get enough for a few cocktails.

Even after stopping to gas up the boat, we still were back in the marina by eleven. The day was successful and I’d had pretty good luck for my first adventure taking my boat on the “high seas,” but I think I may just pass on taking a boat out another hour or so west to chase after tuna! Unless they can find some way to completely flatten out the ocean, I’ll stick to fishing lakes, bays and rivers!

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