Vancouver Saltwater Salmon Fishing Report
As mentioned in past reports, this time of year your options are to explore for some early feeder chinook or head down to the South Arm in search of some coho and late chinook. We had a few trips this past week and based on the wind and the weather, it was an easy choice to keep it a little closer to home. The fish cooperated and we found a few “winters” and as usual they had some smaller bait in their bellies.
If you have a little more time to fish or the weather is looking good, the South Arm is still worth a visit. If you look at the Albion chinook test sets and chum test sets, there are still a decent amount of chinook showing up! You wont see too many coho in these test sets as the size of the gill net used is designed to catch the larger chinook and chum and therefore is not ideal for the common 6 pound Lower Mainland coho. Don’t let this fool you, coho fishing has been good to amazing in most of the Lower Mainland streams and there are still some mid to late fish showing up that you can intercept at the South Arm. Don’t be surprised if you hook into one of those late chinook, it just seems the run won’t quit this year.
A friendly reminder to attend the SFI Annual Policy Conference & Big Splash on November 15th. You all know how this season went down, with some of the best chinook fishing we have ever seen from April to September. Lets not forget we were shut down April, May, June, and July when we encounter less than 1% of the chinook stocks of concern. We were shut down in an effort to keep FN gill nets out of the river during this time period but they still had 94 openings in that same time frame that had a 100% encounter rate on endangered chinook. This battle is coming up again this winter. I need your help, so please join SFI and attend the conference and Big Splash. I have already been in a lot of meetings this past month and expect a more aggressive stance this winter from SFI, enough is enough. Your support does make a difference, so please attend and I look forward to seeing you there.
See you in the shop or on the water,
Jason Tonelli