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From the category archives:
On a warm night recently, the boys and me decided that it might be cool to give topwater striper fishing on the Delta a go. After all, I’d been getting 12-20 topwater blowups per morning on my guide trips. On a nice calm evening, I reasoned, we could put the serious hurtin’ on the fish…
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Okay, so what’s wrong with this picture??
Give up? The problem here is….this is the Yuba City (CA) Boat Ramp along the Feather River on Oct. 5. In what should be prime chinook salmon fishing time, there was only one boat trailer in the lot. Just a few years back, this place would have been wall-to-wall rigs, but with absolutely no salmon showing up this season, nobody’s fishing.
Of course, we did anyway. It was one strange trip…
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Sadly, we had to say farewell to Cordova, Alaska today. Reilly & I had a great ride fishing the road system from a rental car for the past 8 days. Considering we’d never been there before, we figured things out pretty quickly — a conservative estimate is we hooked 250 to 300 silvers during our trip and, in reality, probably more. The trick was to adapt quickly to the ever-changing water levels. We went from low and clear to 7 inches of rain in two days and then back to low, back to high, etc. You get the picture.
Our final two days were incredible…
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Since I last checked in from Alaska, we’ve had 7 inches of rain (and small craft advisories) in just over 2 days here in Cordova…we’ve fished through it all, though. When all the rivers were flooding, we found coho in back sloughs that looked like bass ponds and we absolutely killed them on a bassy-like technique that will remain a secret…
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After our quick fishing tour of Anchorage yesterday, we hopped on a plane to Cordova this morning and fished our asses off in a variety of spots. At Hippie Cove, there were thousands of chrome (and big) silvers laying in the salt water off a spawning stream mouth. They were rolling all over the place — you can see fish jumping behind Tim here…
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Reilly and I hit the ground running in Alaska today. We had a 1-night layover in Anchorage before we head to chase the giant silvers of Cordova, so we rented a car and burned up the highway to Willow Creek. All the local reports said that the fishing sucked, but it turned out nicely for us as there was nobody on the water. Plus, we caught some nice fish, like this beautiful rainbow…
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Sometimes, you’ve just gotta get away from it all for awhile. Ideally, you head somewhere where there’s a beach, nice weather, good scenery…and Dungeness crabs. Lot’s of em!
Luckily, I’ve got friends with a beach house on Puget Sound’s Hood Canal and, even better, is the fact that we’ve yet to do anything to tick them off enough to not get invited out once in a while. My good Alaskan guiding pal Matt and his wife Heidi had us out to the “Canal” in early July and we had a blast. While Hood Canal’s once world-class fishing has been nearly wiped out, the crabbing’s still worthwhile. Being, to put it mildly, crab enthusiasts, we were fired up when Matt suggested we do a seafood dinner!
We loaded up the pots with raw chicken and headed out to a dropoff near the house…
We dumped the pots in 80 feet of water and then it was back to tierra fima for the painstakingly long wait of 3 hours. Patience isn’t a string suit of mine when I’ve got crab on the brain…
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If it sounds like I’m speaking from experience, here, you’re right. Not taking my own advice yesterday, I headed for Lake Oroville without checking what the weather was supposed to do. Why check the forecast? It’s always sunny and hot in July in the Valley, right? Well….
I show up at dawn in my typical summer gear…only to find it sprinkling. A little rain never hurt anybody, plus I had a sweatshirt in the boat. I quickly launched and headed out under a beautiful sunrise…
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