HAMMOND – It began as a whisper; then a hint of promise to follow a torrid summer season; then an avalanche of amazement on every strong tide and even some of the soft ones.
September’s siren of salmon drew us back to the scene of August’s Chinook frenzy, and a symphony of success greeted the fleet’s return, but the mythological temptress brought doom to fish, not man.
Limits…doubles…triples…even a quad here and there as happy anglers returned to the dock before fish checkers began work.
It’s the annual coho rodeo and chunky silvers as big as some Chinook go home in iced fish boxes.
Buoy 10 is a much larger area this year, stretching from the Columbia River’s mouth nearly 40 river miles to the western tip of Puget Island.
And coho are filling in the blanks – there and beyond.
Photo from Bill Monroe
Son Bill Monroe Jr. avoids fishing in crowds when he can and rather than join the aluminum fleet at the buoy, after dropping a set of crab pots along Fort Stevens, he took us upriver past the bridge and beyond the shipwreck to a location close to the Washington shoreline known as Hungry Harbor.
Just around the corner a little farther east is an infamous National Park site labeled “Dismal Niche” by Lewis and Clark, whose exploration stalled, stymied by several days of relentless rainstorms before finally reaching the coast.
Our couple of hours there, however, were far from dismal as we hooked and landed a dozen hatchery coho, one after another. Only a few wild salmon had to be released and there were thankfully few, umm…”short-distance-conservation-releases.”
We used skateboards and Super Baits, mostly Rotten Banana colors packed with tuna-in-oil, but others are doing nearly as well on spinners.
Bill packs ice and cooled our well-bled prizes as we returned to the crab pots and pulled 27 keepers (we opted to pull and go home rather than stretch it out for another couple of hours of riding the current back and forth telling jokes).
…All this without having to play dodge ball with the hungry fleet.
That was last Friday.
By Sunday, the bulk of the B-run vanguard seemed to move on and Bill had to make a seriously long run up past Tongue Point to find fish for his clients.
But more are on the way and the entire river up to the Washington/Oregon state line reopened to mostly hatchery coho on Wednesday (“Mostly” because from the Hood River Bridge east, any legal-sized coho can be kept).
Coho should continue to enter the river through most of October and fresh fish have even been caught in November in some years.
Good information is always available at Big Game Fishing at the Hammond Boat Ramp.
They’re spreading, too.
More than 78,000 have crossed Bonneville Dam, with another 9,000+ over Willamette Falls.
The rodeo has become a round up and more substantial rain will draw spawning coho into virtually every bit of running water they can find.
Bank anglers toss spinners on the Sandy River after wading to either of the river’s two mouths on the delta.
Be cautious, however, even to the point of wearing a pfd on foot. While the Sandy is well named, at its mouth there are some sharp drop offs waiting to test your swimming ability.
The banks of the lower Clackamas River are already lined with resolute spinner-fishers and the wild run is another good one at North Fork Dam. One of these years, with enough substantial data to back them, biologists will seek some wild retention on the Clackamas.
A note for those accustomed to fishing the lower reaches of Eagle Creek: It’s closed to angling after repeated problems with snagging.
Above Willamette Falls, trollers can now find coho off the mouths of most tributaries and some, like the Molalla, are accessible for walk-in angling.
And any coho can be kept upriver from the falls, since they weren’t historically present before the ladder was built.
For boaters, skateboards and spinners are the most popular.
Curiously, six walleye were recorded moving upriver over Willamette Falls in August and September and there was at least one report (unverified, but on the internet so it must be true) of a walleye caught by a salmon troller near the mouth of the Tualatin River.