I spent this past weekend out at my parents' place just north of Hoodsport, fishing for Kings on Hood Canal.

TL;DR version: saw a few fish, but the kings aren't here in any numbers yet.

I brought my boat out there Friday night in order to catch the evening tide. We don't have a boat ramp at my parents' place, and our property sits on a bulkhead about 11 feet above the beach. To launch boats, we have a 35' tall boom with a swingarm and a powered crane. Boats are lifted either via a 3-point system that clips to the bow and stern eyes, or using a sling. It works well, but you have to launch when the tide is in, or when low tide is high enough so that there’s water deep enough to put the boat in.

Anyway, this was the first time I've had my boat in the salt, and the first time launching it there. It turned out to be a very smooth process. We clipped the boat in, lifted it up, swung the boom arm out and lowed the boat into the water.

The low tide that night was still pretty high, so the boat was in about 3' of water at launch. We have a pier that goes out over the water with a rolling ramp out to a floating dock attached to pilings, and I drove the boat out there and tied it up for the night. Upon walking back in from the dock I stopped at the pier for a while and watched the water. There's always a whole bunch of salmon fry and other small fish around the dock, and over the last few months I've seen them grow from the 1" size to around 3". We have a light on the pier and at night like this it's neat to look down and see what's swimming around. The water was very clear and I could see through the 10' or so of water at low tide and see the bottom clearly.

Just at the edge of the light I saw a big shape swim by, looking rather salmon-like. I watched for a while longer to see if it was a salmon or dogfish, and was rewarded over the next half hour by seeing 4 more salmon go slipping past our pier. I grabbed my rod and threw buzz bombs for about an hour without success before going to bed around midnight.

The next morning we hit the water around 7 am and trolled between the Sund Rock Southern boundary to about a half mile past the hatchery and back, several times. We were using large (11') flashers and trailing either dual-hook hootchie rigs or Kingfisher lures. We aimed mostly to have our gear in the 30-45 foot range. (Low oxygen conditions in the canal tends to keep the salmon higher in the water column than you'd find out in the Sound or ocean.)

The flashers I was using were plastic ones, with holographic stickers on them. These are ok, but I notice that at the shallow depts they sometimes have a little trouble sinking- they tend to float up while spinning a lot more than I'd like. My dad had some old style metal flashers that were slightly longer and skinnier than what I was using, and they seemed to have not only a lot more motion, but had no trouble staying more in line with the downrigger ball.

We only saw one other boat out fishing on Saturday, and none of the Native Americans were putting their nets out, so it's pretty clear the main run hasn't started yet. I was surprised to see no one on the beach fishing at the hatchery beach either.

We fished until around 10:30, then took a break before heading back to the water at noon and fishing until about 4 pm. Grand total of our catch: 1 small cutthroat trout, and one flounder that grabbed my lure when I got a little too close to shore and put my gear on the bottom. (both were released unharmed). We did see a couple of salmon jump during the day, and the seals were out chasing something, but that's it.

Sunday was similar- a few guys putting their nets out, and a couple more boats, but no crowds and no fish. We had our crab pots out both days, both in around 200' of water. We only caught a handful of Dungeness, and they were all too small or female. We also caught one keepable rock crab.

Anyway, that's my weekend- we fished most of the day on both days with no salmon caught. My take is that the run hasn't started yet. (you can normally see them going up the hatchery creek when they are in) I'll be going back next weekend to try again.

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