Fall Season 2015

The air outside remains hot at the moment, more like July than August, but we are in full-fall fishing mode and will be for the remainder of the season.

But let's back up a bit and recap the summer. After last summer, we were expecting poor king fishing again this season. We're happy to report that this year's king salmon season improved over last year's low numbers. While certainly not great, it wasn't that bad and we came back to port with some large kings just about every time out. What also elevated our catch-numbers overall this summer were all the other species that filled in the spaces. Sometimes these were coho salmon, steelhead and lake trout. But many times they were brown trout as a cold water layer remained near shore and both kings and browns were inhabiting the same waters. As of this writing in fact, the biggest fish on the boat so far this season was a 21lb brown trout.

With the bulk of the resident king salmon just about in spawn-phase by now and at the pier heads and in the channel, we are now traveling offshore to capitalize on large numbers of lake trout. We do this because the spawn-phase kings are very difficult to catch and the numbers of lake trout as well as steelhead and some coho and younger king salmon, are too hard to pass up. The catches have been good over the past two weeks, during a seasonally slow period of fishing at this time of year, and we hope the bite should at least remain that way or even accelerate as we move through September and into October to the end of the season.

- Capt Rick