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sapo
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Hit Nehalem at about 12:45 yesterday, just as the tide was starting to come in. Started at Wheeler and we had 3 rods with FBRs w/anchovies and one rod with cut plug blue label herring. Trolled around wheeler for about an hour where I hooked a fish very briefly, but lost it. Trolled back and forth for another 30 minutes with nothing and when we were about to head off to the jetty, my grandpa got snagged and when trying to stop the line from spooling off his reel, his finger got caught in the reel somehow and he got a pretty nasty cut, it looked very painful. Once his finger was out of the reel we headed to the jetty.
Water was really calm at the jetty. Tide was coming in pretty fast so our motor was on (Boat pointing towards the ocean) but the boat was stationary. We dropped our lines down and the incoming tide spun our anchovies/baits quite well. So the boat was stationary but we had great action on our bait. About 2 minutes later, my dad hooked a fish! It spooled probably 50 yards of line off his reel at a tight drag setting (his reel had about 100 yards of line and he almost ran out of line) and ran upriver, then just sat in a hole. We chased it upriver with the boat, and after 10 more minutes of fighting the fish we got it into the boat. Really big chinook:
It was my dad's first chinook in 30 years..awesome experience. I couldn't even lift it into the boat with the net, my younger brother had to help me. Big fish for sure. A very interesting thing about this fish is that it looked like it had recently survived a seal or something, had a big gash near the tail on one side of it:
Quite an interesting mark, it looked fresh..not sure when it happened though.
After the excitement of my dad's chinook, we put our lines back in the water and almost right away I had a fish on. It splashed at the surface and appeared to be a coho, but it shook the hook and I lost it. At this point the tide was slowing down, it was kind of slack. The sun was almost setting and we needed to get back, so we headed back and trolled the Wheeler stretch one more time, then packed up. There was a guy who snagged a salmon and kept it, but other than that (Besides the fact there were few boats in the bay) the other boats didn't have much success from what I saw. The only boats that I saw with success besides ours were boats that went into the ocean just past the bay, but their chinook weren't nearly as big as my dad's. Heard of a couple coho caught, but the main catch seems to be chinook right now. Coho definitely aren't going up NF Nehalem in numbers yet, that thing is a trickle. Beautiful day and very few other boats out there. I like the look of my tackle box with salmon blood on it:
Beautiful day and sunset, and also our first salmon ever at Nehalem, after going there for many years.
Water was really calm at the jetty. Tide was coming in pretty fast so our motor was on (Boat pointing towards the ocean) but the boat was stationary. We dropped our lines down and the incoming tide spun our anchovies/baits quite well. So the boat was stationary but we had great action on our bait. About 2 minutes later, my dad hooked a fish! It spooled probably 50 yards of line off his reel at a tight drag setting (his reel had about 100 yards of line and he almost ran out of line) and ran upriver, then just sat in a hole. We chased it upriver with the boat, and after 10 more minutes of fighting the fish we got it into the boat. Really big chinook:
It was my dad's first chinook in 30 years..awesome experience. I couldn't even lift it into the boat with the net, my younger brother had to help me. Big fish for sure. A very interesting thing about this fish is that it looked like it had recently survived a seal or something, had a big gash near the tail on one side of it:
Quite an interesting mark, it looked fresh..not sure when it happened though.
After the excitement of my dad's chinook, we put our lines back in the water and almost right away I had a fish on. It splashed at the surface and appeared to be a coho, but it shook the hook and I lost it. At this point the tide was slowing down, it was kind of slack. The sun was almost setting and we needed to get back, so we headed back and trolled the Wheeler stretch one more time, then packed up. There was a guy who snagged a salmon and kept it, but other than that (Besides the fact there were few boats in the bay) the other boats didn't have much success from what I saw. The only boats that I saw with success besides ours were boats that went into the ocean just past the bay, but their chinook weren't nearly as big as my dad's. Heard of a couple coho caught, but the main catch seems to be chinook right now. Coho definitely aren't going up NF Nehalem in numbers yet, that thing is a trickle. Beautiful day and very few other boats out there. I like the look of my tackle box with salmon blood on it:
Beautiful day and sunset, and also our first salmon ever at Nehalem, after going there for many years.
