Kayak Fishing for Coho Salmon in the Columbia River Gorge

There are still fair numbers of coho salmon coming over the Bonneville Dam, especially this late in the season, but the salmon fishing is definitely slowing down here in the Columbia River Gorge. We haven’t caught a chinook salmon for a few weeks now, there are plenty of spawned out dead ones on the bottom of the local rivers, so the king salmon fishing season is pretty much over. The coho salmon fishing has been very good, most of the fish are still silvery and fresh, but the number of coho coming over the dam is dropping sharply every day. I spoke with a local guy who caught a few steelhead so maybe we are going to have a decent winter steelhead run although there are not that many fish coming over the dam.

We got out on the Klickitat River a few days ago. Usually, by this time of the year the fishing has slowed down and the locals can get a few days of relatively peaceful salmon fishing in, but on this day, the river was packed with boats. The Klickitat is not that big of a river, fifty or more boats on a mile long stretch of river that’s only ten or twenty yards wide is ridiculous; you could barely get around. The Columbia Gorge is about an hour’s drive from the Portland/Vancouver metro area, turns out there was an article in one of the papers telling everyone the Klickitat River was going off and to get out there; that’s what happened. Packed to the gills.

Thankfully, we got there early and managed to catch a few fish before the bulk of the mob got there.

Kayak fishing for salmon on the Klickitat River

I caught a couple nice coho salmon early and got a couple more later while trying to negotiate the flotilla of boats.

Coho salmon caught kayak fishing on the Klickitat River

We went back a couple days later and got a few more coho salmon, but the fishing was definitely on the downswing. This was the biggest fish I caught, a nice coho salmon.

Coho salmon caught kayak fishing on the Klickitat River

With the fishing slowing down and some nasty weather on the way, I sadly packed up the kayak and put it into the garage for the winter. It has been a great year of kayak fishing, the steelhead and salmon season was the best I’ve ever had. I might sneak out for a few more days of salmon fishing, this time of year you can do just as well fishing from the bank as you can from the kayak and it’s a lot less effort. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get another salmon or two, if I’m really lucky, a late season steelhead.

This is the time of year we add a lot of photos and videos to the website because we spend a lot more time indoors, so keep checking in here on the blog or on the watermanatwork.com website for new stuff.

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