The weather continues to be very nice, albeit a little chilly in the morning, the wind has remained mostly calm and the great salmon fishing on the Klickitat River in southwest Washington has continued.
I had my best day of salmon fishing ever and probably one of the best days of freshwater kayak fishing ever on October 22. I caught a big male Chinook salmon and an even bigger Coho salmon while kayak fishing on the Klickitat. These are the biggest Chinook and Coho salmon I have ever caught. These are big fish and they put up a great fight, true trophy fish.
Trolling a fluorescent red Wiggle Wart has been working really well until recently, now it seems the best way to get the salmon is by fishing with salmon eggs. There are a number of ways to fish with salmon eggs and it helps to have that secret cure recipe that the fish really like.
These salmon were caught on salmon eggs taken from a female salmon caught a few days earlier and cured with an old time local curing recipe. The eggs taken from this female coho salmon were saved, taken home and cured for the next fishing trip.
A few days later, we returned to the river to find the water level had dropped considerably; not a positive thing as far as fishing goes. As we started fishing, it was clear that it would be a slower day than recent big-time salmon fishing days. The number of fish coming up the Columbia River and over the nearest dam have dropped off from recent record numbers, combined with the low water level, it was going to take some effort to come home with more salmon.
We trolled with the trusty Wiggle Wart at sunrise and caught a small jack coho salmon. Figuring we wouldn’t have a problem catching bigger fish, we released it back into the river. If we would have known how slow the salmon fishing was going to be for the rest of the day, we probably would have kept it. After the one jack salmon, we had no further luck trolling so we tied off the kayak at one of the spots where we caught the big salmon a few days earlier and started fishing with salmon eggs. The salmon fishing was very slow, nobody was having any real success. We did manage to catch about a dozen sturgeon, which are fun to fight, but we were after the salmon and not having much luck.
I finally managed to hook and land a nice sized coho salmon, it would turn out to be the only salmon I took home after a long day of fishing.
We’re starting to worry that this record salmon run may be coming to an end. We might give it another shot after this weekend, if the fishing is worse, I’m afraid that might be it for the 2013 kayak fishing season here in the Columbia Gorge.
Hello my name is Landon and I am looking to fish the Klickitat from my kayak this year and was wondering if you had any tips that could help me out. Also would you be willing to share your egg cure recipe. Just got some fresh eggs and need to cure them up.
I good place to start for curing eggs if you’ve never done it before is the “3-2-1 method”. It’s a simple and effective recipe, if you google it you will find plenty of information. Trolling works pretty well sometimes fishing eggs is the ticket, it depends how the fish are going. The lower Klickitat can get very crowded, especially on weekends, be careful in a kayak.