Coho With An Attitude
Fellow listmember, Brian Lencho, and I fished the outgoing tide
yesterday at Sekiu from 7 am to 12 noon in a rented boat from Van
Riper's ($86). Occasionally, the morning sun would peek out from
behind the high clouds, but for the most part, it was overcast and
the water was dead calm. We began our search for coho by trolling.
Brian fished a traditional bucktail and I switched back and forth
between various streamer concoctions and poppers. We motored back and
forth over most of the water in Clallam Bay, concentrating our search
along the kelp beds.
We trolled for an hour and a half without a strike. Next to the bell
buoy at the rocks near Slip Point, Brian hooked his first fish, a
five pound wild coho. We narrowed our search and began circling the
area looking for feeding schools. On our third pass off Slip Point,
we made a tight turn and Brian hooked up again on his bucktail. The
change in speed and direction also brought a huge boil to my popper.
The game was on.
Schools of three to four inch herring were swimming under our boat.
Gulls were diving into the water inside the kelp beds and just enough
salmon were crashing into the herring to let us know they were
around. And we were the only boat there.
For the next three hours, we drifted along the outside edge of the
kelp beds just off the beach. We cast poppers into the holes in the
kelp and stripped them back to the boat. I don't think we made more
than a dozen casts that didn't elicit a strike or follow. We lost
count, but figure we each had at least 30 fish up to the boat. We
weren't netting them. We simply reached down over the boat and and
slipped out the barbless hooks. We took photographs of the first few
salmon but soon became too busy to shoot. We were in a zone, you
might say. There were a few shakers but most were wild coho between
four and five pounds with a few that were over. Toss in a couple
good-sized blackmouth, and we had the makings of a good day.
What made the fishing so fun was the popper on the surface. We would
make a long cast to the edge of the kelp bed. As soon the popper hit
the water, we began stripping with short strips and pauses. Within
the first couple strips, we could see a salmon wake behind the fly
and that's when the fun began. We provoked strikes by manipulating
our poppers. Brian said it was like teasing a cat with a string. We
sped up like a frightened baitfish and the salmon would slam the fly
from behind. We stopped dead and the salmon would turn away, then
when we twitched the popper, the salmon would turn back and take the
fly from the side with a huge boil. We changed directions with quick
mends and the salmon crashed the fly. When we stripped our poppers up
to the boat, we could see the salmon behind the fly. If we raised the
rod and pulled the fly alongside the boat and stopped, the salmon
would take it at our feet. All our moves brought violent strikes.
These coho had a bad attitude and wanted to annihilate our flies!
Around noon, the action slowed, so we headed back to the docks to get
something to eat. On the way, we decided that since Brian needed to
get home that night, we might as well call it a day and leave after a
gourmet lunch of hot roast beef sandwiches with instant mashed
potatoes, powdered gravy mix and canned peas at the Breakwater. How
else could we top the morning we just had?
