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How To: Plug for River Salmon

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In this, the most comprehensive guide of its kind ever assembled, I cover everything you need to know to consistently catch river salmon on wobbling plugs like FlatFish and Kwikfish.

Packed with full color photographs and diagrams, I go over everything from the basics to sophisticated tricks used by pro guides.

Get ready to catch more river salmon with my latest guidebook: Plug Fishing for River Salmon, now available for just $2.99:

Amazon Kindle
PDF format (digital download)
Nook
iTunes

Buy Now

I’ll help you understand why salmon eat plugs in the first place and then goes into great detail on several deadly techniques that will help you be more successful on the water.

Flatfish

You’ll learn how to back-bounce, flatline and hover – and several other related methods. I’ll also show you the tackle you’ll need and how to pick the right size, color and models of plugs for each specific technique.

Plug Fishing for River Salmon features close-up gear shots so you can see exactly what to use and how to rig it!

Plug Fishing for River Salmon features close-up gear shots so you can see exactly what to use and how to rig it!

Also included are tips on how to properly rig plugs with different styles of hooks, how to properly tune your lures and the best way to fillet sardines and make bait wraps.

Plug fishing for river salmon

In it, I cover in detail Back-Bouncing, Flat-Lining, Hovering, Plug Wraps, Plug Selection, Tuning and a bunch of other cool stuff I employ every single day on the water!

The book will have plenty of helpful diagrams!

There are tons of color pics of gear and rigs (and fish too!), plus full color diagrams to help you understand the concepts.

Pick up your copy today!

Amazon Kindle
PDF format (digital download)
Nook
iTunes

 

Here’s a list of the chapters that appear in this guidebook:

Why do Kings Bite in Freshwater?

  • Anger Management
  • Feeding Instinct
  • Time of Day

Flatlining

  • Tuning the Plug
  • Dropping In
  • The Bite
  • Rod Angle
  • Rods, Reels & Line
  • Bait Wraps
  • Pregame Prep

Hybrid Flatlining

  • Borrowing from the side-drifting box
  • Rigging Up
  • Sinkers
  • Technique
  • Backtrolling with Divers

Back-Bouncing

  • Traditional Back-Bouncing
  • Hovering
  • The Go Big Technique
  • Rods, Reels & Line
  • Rigging Up

Plug Selection

  • Flatlining
  • Back-Bouncing/Hovering
  • Plug Color
  • The Basic Food Groups
  • Meat Group
  • Diet Group
  • Chocolate Group
  • Junk Food Group
  • Pimp Your Plugs
  • Wash Your Lures

Plug Wraps

  • Fresher is Better
  • The Tools
  • The Technique
  • Wrap it up!
  • Change ‘em frequently
  • The Night Before
  • How-To Videos

Improving Your Hook-Up Ratio with Plugs

  • The Trouble with Trebles
  • Rotating Trebles
  • Single Hooks

A once prolific Steelhead Stream: The Los Angeles River

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20120728-201254.jpg
If you could go back in time to the 1940’s and 1950’s, you would find a very different looking Los Angeles River than you see today.

Back then, the river was free-flowing and hosted a robust run of steelhead. Hard to believe these days since the poor dilapidated river has been reduced to a graffiti covered concrete drainage ditch in the heart of massive urban sprawl. Now, broken bottles and diapers are the norm…not chrome ocean-run rainbows.

But there are parts of the stream…upstream of downtown LA…that still kinda resemble an actual river. I spent some time exploring one such reach on Friday. It was exciting to see that there is still a bit of river left.

And it was thriving with waterfowl, plus many fish eating birds like cormorants, herons and egrets. In the slow pools, there were clouds of minnows and some slightly larger fish as well. In fact some folks were even fishing. I wanted to believe that the fish were schools of steelhead fry but I of course knew better.

As cool as it was to see so much wildlife mere feet from a e-waste recycling center and roaring I-5, it was also so damned depressing to see how destroyed this once amazing waterway is. So, it was with mixed emotions that explored this area. Here’s a photo essay of my trek…

Click here to read more…

JD’s Near-Miss with Rock Stardom!

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Okay, many of you have heard the stories of my near-miss in the music industry in the early 1990s. The short version is this: A buddy and I decided we wanted to become rock stars, but didn’t have the talent. So, instead we went for a gimmick and blended two kinds of music together…country & rap (otherwise known as “crap”) and, quite surprisingly, we damn near made it. An expensive video, three record contract offers from Nashville and a meeting with Fleetwood Mac’s producer followed and we were on our way. Somewhere along the line, however, the train got derailed and the Boom Cowboys fizzled out..and the Beatles were able to breathe a sigh of relief.

So, for all of you who’ve been asking all these years, here’s your shot to finally see the Boom Cowboys Cut It Up video. And yep, sad to say that’s me with the hot pink shirt and cow guitar…(hey, it was a loooong time ago, what can I say!).

And here’s another shot of the Boom Cowboyz working their magic in the studio. Apparently, pink was a common thread in my life back in the day…

Well, there you have it…if you really, really want to hear the whole story, maybe I’ll tell ya sometime out on the boat. Now, go ahead…the comments section is yours. Do your worst!

80+ lb. salmon carcass found!

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Giant King Salmon
This mammoth, record-class king salmon was found dead on Oct. 30 in Battle Creek, a major tributary to Northern California’s Sacramento River by a crew of biologists surveying the creek for spawners.

“The length of this giant was 1290 mm (50.7 inches!) and I can’t remember the massive girth, but a weight calculator gave an estimate of 85 pounds!” says Matt Johnson, of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, who sent to photo in to be entered in our Smoker of the Year Contest. “Some lucky dog might have broken the state record had there been a season this year!”
Click here to read more…

Trolling for San Francisco Bay Halibut

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jay-lopes
While live bait drifting has always been a popular method for hooking California halibut from Baja to Oregon, trolling is really gaining a good following and its easy to see why: it allows you to cover lots of ground quickly and locate fish… plus, it’s deadly!

Here’s how to do it:
Click here to read more…