Saturday offered us the perfect tides and weather to share a little salmon fishing action. I invited a few of my favorite coworkers, who rarely get out on the salt, and we had a great day fishing in Marine Area 10.
After dropping a few crab pots, we raced over to Kingston to do a little mooching. I did bring the trolling gear, but I wanted to get everyone to experience the thrill of catching salmon the old fashioned way, with nothing between us and the chew except a small sinker and a cut plug herring. We searched the area for bait and found scattered schools of herring, unfortunately nothing like what I’ve seen in the past few weekends but enough to do a few drifts. We released a small Chinook and lost one about five pounds. A great start but after a few drifts I decided to give Jeff Head a try.
We headed to Jeff Head and trolled a while for coho, hooked a few and landed a nice four pounder that we put in the cooler. Then, as we trolled along the eastern end, we started to see piles and piles of bait. Time to give the downriggers a break and bust out the mooching rods again!
We drifted around the southeastern side of Jeff Head, and mooched the top 100′, starting our drift in 220′ and drifting up onto the bar. As the tide bottomed out, we had a window of phenomenal mooching action. We got another nice coho and battled a few nice Chinook.
Once the currents subsided during the tide change the dogfish found us. We moved around the south side of Jeff Head, searching for bait, dropping and reeling, and found a few more Chinook before the dogfish once again found us.
Overall, it seemed that the entire trolling fleet had decent catches of coho, and we saw a few moochers out there also with good catches. Another great weekend of salmon fishing within sight of Seattle!
Marine Area 10 Salmon Fishing Report July 7
