There has been some decent chinook fishing this week, with some excellent fishing last weekend. Most of the action has been off S Bowen on what is known as the Hump. This fishery has lived up to its typical random nature as some boats were fortunate enough to find fish while others had little to no action. This is a large open water fishery so it is pretty easy to not get on top of fish, only to have a boat in the same general area do much better.
Saturday and Sunday were our lucky days as we had charters on both days and were fortunate enough to find some fish. On Saturday we put 4 fish in the boat, a 20, 18, 17 and a 12, and lost 2 others. All the fish were marbled chinook and all were taken rather deep at 143 to 163 on the riggers in around 500-575 feet of water off the Hump. The most consistent producing gear was a glow or double glow flasher in green or chartreuse blade, a 6 foot leader to a Glow/Green or Irish Cream spoon, or a glow green/chartreuse teaser head and 5.5 inch anchovy. All the fish were examined at the cleaning table and all had herring in their stomach. Mostly a few 4-5 inch herring, although one of the fish had 13 herring of about 3-4 inches each in its stomach! So these are aggressively feeding fish, the key is finding them and figuring out the depth…
Sunday was a similar story with 7 hook ups and 4 fish hitting the boat deck.
Jason with a nice catch of winter chinook salmon
The fish were smaller for us on Sunday, around 10-13 pounds. Two were marbled springs and two were red springs that were hatchery. The same depths seemed to work well, our shallowest fish was 127 but most of the fish were 140-160. The glow theme continued, glow flashers, spoons, teaser heads.
We were back out again on Tuesday, first thing in the morning and fished until 11:00 am and got skunked. We trolled for about 4 hours and not a bite through the high slack which was around 9 am. We did get some reports that the fishing picked up on the ebb tide. The Seastar was out in the afternoon and put two nice chinook in the boat and a fiend of Preston put 3 in his boat. It seems as though the ebb tide is producing right now for this fishery.
We expect there to be good fishing here for about the next 3-4 weeks and we are hearing whispers of some fish over on the “other side” from Nanaimo down to Gabriola, although we haven’t been over there ourselves.
Eddie is out on Saturday for a charter and he will be heading out to S. Bowen/Hump area. I will probably be back out mid week for some charters and some personal fishing and then back out for charters again on the 27th and 28th.
We have all the items discussed in today’s report in stock. If you would like to book a charter, please give us a call at the shop and you can book a day with Eddie or Jason.
Jason Tonelli