It was on and off rain yesterday, today was all rain with a few breaks. The wind stayed calm and it wasn’t too cold, so it wasn’t bad, just completely wet. Stumbling over wet rocks in the dark adds a little more excitement to the already pretty exciting business of kayak fishing for salmon on the Columbia River.
Just after getting on the water and anchoring, I had a nice solid hit. With the salmon fishing on a quick downturn, the hits were few and far between, so you have to make them stick. After a good battle, I had a nice Chinook in the net. Not a bad start, but right after that, the fishing action slowed down and the rain picked up. I had a couple weak bumps and hooked what looked to be a decent Chinook salmon that came unbuttoned after a couple jumps. About thirty wet minutes later, I got another hookup. I could tell it was a bit smaller than the first fish, but as I got it closer to the kayak, I could tell it was a nice, silvery Coho salmon.
Got the Coho into the landing net and on the stringer. Kind of happy to get a limit, but even happier to get the daily salmon limit and get out of the rain.
You can see in the photo that the bigger Chinook is darker than the Coho salmon. Not as dark as the salmon I caught yesterday, but the Chinook run is a little earlier than the Coho run so the Coho salmon are in a little better shape at this stage of the annual salmon run. The Chinook are all going to be dark at this stage, we would be hoping for more Coho to show up. The Coho run is also pretty sad, so I think today we just got lucky.
With the non-stop rain, all the fishing gear is wet. Tomorrow looks like a borderline wind day, the freezer is just about full of salmon, so we are going to take a day off to dry out and rest up. We’ll try it again day after tomorrow.