Sunday was a day I will always remember, fishing with my good friend Mathew Messing of Messing Around Fishing Charters. I’ve had the pleasure of fishing with Mat before, and working with him during my own charters, sharing information to ensure that all of our guests had the best experience. Mat is one of my favorite people, and I was really excited that we were going on a fun fishing trip. Mat’s girlfriend Amanda had the day off from work and after today, entered the circle of one of my favorite people to fish with! What an awesome day.
Mathew and Amanda cruised across Puget Sound from Brownsville Marina to pick me up from Shilshole. We headed north to drop our crab pots. I had a bucket full of fresh Westport Albacore Tuna carcasses from the day before, we baited and set our pots and headed to Jeff Head for a little fishing.
With the tide just starting to ebb, Mat set us up on the south side of Jeff Head, and we ran a great troll spread of flasher/spoons. Initially, we had great action on Chinook, but the odds were not in our favor with a handful of adult Wild Chinook and sublegal Chinook, all released obviously. As the currents started to push hard against the south side of Jeff Head, we saw a really good showing of bait on our sonar, and fishing picked up bigtime. We picked up one Coho after the next, all on the flasher/spoon combo. Amanda out-fished me by a wide margin!
I was very surprised that all of our Coho were caught while we were fishing at Chinook depths. We ran our gear from 100′ to 160′ and caught Coho at both ends of that depth range.
We slowly accumulated our 6 Coho limit within a couple hours, and once we had our sixth, headed back to the crab pots to pull. We ended up with seven really good sized Dungeness and were super happy with that!
I have always enjoyed fishing with Mat. He is an amazing captain, makes the day very enjoyable and his boat is very comfortable fishing machine. The guy knows how to make a Puget Sound fishing trip one to remember!
My First Westport Albacore Rally of 2022
