It’s a sad day when the kayak fishing season is over, but the time has come to wrap up the 2016 kayak fishing season. With the salmon and steelhead fishing closed on the Columbia River, the only place left to fish for salmon is a local river. They have been catching a few coho salmon, but the river is running high from a lot of rain. We drove by the river to check it out, it was packed with boats. Not into that so we headed to a spot on the Columbia River to try for some smallmouth bass. We wanted to go to another spot, but before we burned a bunch of gas, we wanted to see if the bass were even biting. Never been smallmouth fishing in October, usually we’d be fishing for salmon, so we didn’t know what to expect. The boat launch was unusually quiet for this time of year.
It was overcast, but not very cold and there was no wind. The water temp in the Columbia was about 58-60°F. The water level was pretty high, as you would expect with all the rain we’ve been having, and the water wasn’t perfectly clear, but we were hoping to find a few bass looking for that last big meal before winter.
Unfortunately, we did not find any smallmouth bass. We did not even get a bite. When you go fishing for salmon or steelhead and you don’t catch anything, that’s part of the deal. Not that unusual. When you go smallmouth bass fishing at a spot where we’ve caught hundreds of fish and don’t get a bite, it’s time to pack it in. Fishing season, and winter in general, always seems to come early, but in reality, we are only talking about a week or two. The salmon fishing on the Columbia River being closed really sucks, but the fishing was not really that good this season anyway. That’s the way fishing is.
The good news is that the dismal PacNW winter is when we get most of our editing work done. We’ve got a lot of kayak fishing video and photos to go through and get them on the watermanatwork.com website and YouTube. We already have a list of projects, so as soon as the kayak gear is packed away for the winter, which will probably cause some alcohol consumption, we will be in the editing room, so stay tuned!