After about a week of snow, ice, rain and freezing fog, the weather finally cleared up enough to give us another shot at the salmon here in the Columbia River Gorge. It’s still late fall and the temperature in in the mid forties, but that looks pretty good after a week or so where it never got above freezing so we headed on down to the local salmon stream. We’ve packed up the kayaks for the season but you can still catch salmon from the bank just about as easily as you can from a boat; if you know where to go.
It was a cold start to the day but I didn’t notice too much because after a few casts I had a nice fish on. Turned out to be a late season coho salmon. Usually, we catch a lot of chinooks here, but this year it’s been mostly coho salmon.
I caught this guy before the sun came up and I put it on the stringer, but when it got light I saw how dark he was so I released him back into the river. Hopefully he’ll make it upstream to spawn.
After a few more casts I had another solid hookup. After a nice fight, I got the fish to the shore and saw it was a nice, silvery coho salmon, a definite keeper.
The bite slowed down so we called it a day. After a week away from the river, we figured out where the salmon are now and we will be headed there tomorrow. Not too many decent days left before we see more winter weather.