I was out yesterday in the local waters of Vancouver on an 8 hour charter. We spent most of the morning off W. Van, in particular, the flats in about 20-30 feet of water just W off the Pink Apartment. There were about 20 other boats fishing the area for Capilano Coho and you could see the fish rolling and jumping around. Most of the fish have been taken in this area anywhere from 20 to 60 feet of water and 15 to 40 feet on the downriggers. The fish are getting picky and most of us have been doing better on anchovies than the usual white hootchy. That being said, Craig, one of our regular customers, went out last night to test his motor and boated 2 nice hatchery coho in 30 minutes. No hits on spoons or bait, both fish were on white hootchies. I think a lot of it boils down to the fact the fish are simply getting very moody, which is typical of staging fish, and particularly coho. Some schools bite more than others and the fish go on and off the bite. You will also find morning and evening often produce the best. We managed a few bites and one decent coho in the box and then we went to the Bell Buoy looking for chinook.
A few other guide boats made the move to the Bell for chinook on the high slack as well. For all the boats there it was pretty slow. I only saw 2 chinook taken from 8 boats in about 2-3 hours of hard fishing towards the high slack. The fish that got caught were around the Bell Buoy in 80 feet of water about 40 feet down on anchovies in glow teaser heads, 6 foot leader behind your favourite flasher. I watched another one of our customers Jason H. hook and land a beauty in his boat, a nice 22lb red spring. So it isn’t red hot chinook fishing yet, but it will start to pick up next week as we near peak migration for these nice springs in mid to late August.
We are out guiding today (Eddie is out) and all weekend, so see you out there.
Jason Tonelli