Here’s a beautifully filmed video of how the salmon fits into the Big Picture in Alaska. Lots of nice scenery and wildlife! Cool sounding soundtrack too…
Catching Atlantic Salmon in the Salt
You read plenty about catching Atlantic Salmon in freshwater, but I’ve always wondered if there’s an ocean troll fishery for them somewhere. Yes, these are the random things I think about when I can’t sleep. But anyway, apparently there are some offshore fisheries, including at least one in Denmark. A quick Google search led me to these these pix of absolutely gorgeous salmon on the Shark Cannonballs FB site, but there wasn’t a ton of info about the fishery. In fact, there was very little about catching Atlantics in the sea anywhere that I found on the internet.
Sure, I’d rather catch ’em in some beautiful river flowing through an enchanted forest, but these fish are so stinkin’ pretty, it makes me wanna catch one offshore too! And by the way, this is what an Atlantic Salmon is supposed to look like…not the round finned mutants from the net pens!
It’s a BIG Ocean out there: Top 6 Ships vs. Giant Seas Video
As a boat guy, I’ve always been fascinated by giant seas…and let’s fact it, crazy-big waves are what make Deadliest Catch so compelling to watch on TV, right?
Well, here’s a video that makes me happy to be a freshwater guy! There’s some really amazing stuff about 5 mins into the thing…
Faces only a mother could love
Chinook salmon are amazingly beautiful animals but there are a few that look like maybe they, through genetics or misfortune, fell outta the Ugly Tree and hit every branch on the way down.
Take the one above for example. It was taken this summer in the ocean off Eureka, CA and looks like a classic case of some bad genes.
Capt Tony Sepulveda of the six-pac charter boat Shellback said this about his catch:
“I’d guess it was hatchery related when he was but a wee minnow,” he says.
Or maybe the ol “he was dropped on his head when he was a baby” theory applies. Kidding of course…
Now, look at this one I caught 200 miles up the Sacramento River a few days back… My best guess is this one tangled with some commercial gear out in the ocean…
And, finally, here is one we caught on the Sac River this morning…
I’m not sure what happened to this buck’s snout but since it’s healed over, I’m thinking it had a near-miss with something hungry in its younger days.
Maybe a great blue heron? River otter? Seal? Sea lion?
Why You Should Use Mike’s Brite & Tight Herring Cure
The ocean off Northern California has been loaded with king salmon all summer, so three of us took the ol’ skiff out of Bodega Bay the other day to try to get in on the action. We ended up hooking over a dozen kings and landing our limits (6) in what proved to be a very nice day on the creek.
While I wasn’t really intending to do any testing, a very interesting pattern developed. I brined half our herring & anchovies in Atlas-Mikes Brite and Tight the night before and left half of it “naked.” My uncle and I fished the brined baits, while our buddy, we’ll call him “Knucklehead Angler #3,” ran with the uncured stuff, laughing off my “silly little colored Swedish Fish-looking baits.”
Well, the final tally was all but two bites came on the cured baits: We fished all lines at 114 feet on the downriggers and the green cured stuff took top honors, followed by the red and then blue. Natural herring and anchovies came in dead last. Knuckle Head #3 only switched to the brined stuff at the end of the day…because he was sitting on only 1 fish!
Now, I’m not even sure the kings can discern colors down there at that depth, so I’m thinking the fact that the cure is UV-infused helped the fish locate it better. Also, it’s got a bunch of scent in it, so that probably made the cured baits easier for the fish to zero in on as well.
So, this is just a one-day, impromptu test but the results were pretty dramatic! The brined rods went off steadily all day while Knucklehead’s was silent pretty much the whole trip. In fact, take a look at the text I got from him just this morning…Apparently he is now a believer!
The fish off California this year are nice and fat! They are apparently eating well and look almost like silver largemouth bass with that football shape!
