You’d be hard-pressed to find a faster response to a lure from a fish than this one!
Underwater Salmon Bites: King chasing down a spinner
You can learn some very interesting stuff by seeing whats going on below the surface. Check out this cool sequence I shot of a king salmon chasing down my Spinner Dave’s Custom Designs spinner. Again I used the trusty [easyazon_link identifier=”B00R8I6W5O” locale=”US” tag=”fiwijd-20″]Okuma Waterwolf[/easyazon_link] Camera and rigged it in-line on my leader about 3 feet up from the lure. I trolled it downstream at about 3 mph and got some sweet footage…
He’s in hot pursuit…
Open wide…
Right in the corner of the jaw…
Notice how the line in this next shot has gone slack as the fish swims towards the boat…
Now he knows he’s hooked and the big head-shakes start…
The violent head-shakes are why the bite look so cool on the rod!
Underwater Photos: The Rejection
Sometimes everything can be right…the cast, the drift, the bait…and still the fish don’t get hooked. Here’s an interesting scene I shot on a tributary to the Togiak River in Alaska, where a nice Dolly Varden does a fly-by on roe cluster but doesn’t commit to the bait.
The Dolly Varden makes his move…
But something just isn’t right…the close proximity of the camera perhaps?
Even that milky goodness seeping out of the bait wasn’t enough for this guy! Why do you think he didn’t go all in?
Underwater Photos: King Salmon eats a Glo Bug
More cool underwater stuff from my travels in Alaska in July: Here’s a king salmon attacking a Yarnie or Glo Bug (no eggs or scent). Though I clipped off the hook point while filming, it’s interesting to see how he would never have been hooked anyway — because the fish bites away from the hook!
Yarn and eggs…yum!
Yep, I gotta eat that! (Although notice how he bites the yarn ball but completely misses the hook!)
No change for a hook-up here…the hook is still outside his mouth. In a nano-second he spit it out (off camera) but look at that other little Chinook in the background moving in for a bite!