It’s been a pretty good weekend for salmon fishing here in the Columbia River Gorge. It hasn’t been raining, but the wind has been a factor. With the salmon season about over, we are getting up early to beat the wind; that was the ticket the past couple days. Yesterday, the wind came up quickly about 11:00 AM, but I managed to get a coho in the kayak before getting blown off the river.
I got one salmon on the stringer, but I lost another one and have an even better fish story than the “salmon was too big for the landing net” story from the other day. This salmon ripped the screw eye and hook clean out of the wiggle wart I was using. Gotta be kidding me.
These salmon are big, strong fish. You can expect just about anything when you get one hooked up.
Went out again this morning knowing the wind would be a factor. Almost didn’t go because the wind was already blowing pretty hard when the alarm went off at 4:00 AM. Because we are down to the last salmon fishing days of the year, we decided to give it a shot. It was windy and we couldn’t go too far out into the river because there were three foot wind waves on the rivermouth sandbar. We stuck close to the rivermouth and managed to get our limit of two coho salmon within an hour of paddling out. Good thing, because the wind came up quickly again and by 10:00 we were off the river and headed home.
Looks like rain tomorrow, but not too much wind, so we are getting up early again to try our luck.