Headed out of Mukilteo early Saturday morning with a coworker, my wife, and a cousin to get in on the craziness out at Humpy Hollow. Our initial plan was to just do your standard down rigger trolling, but my coworker hadn't had time to mount his new down riggers so we ended up jigging instead. We spent a few hours jigging pink buzz bombs and rotators with pink squid hoochies, as well pink and white marabou jigs but surprisingly had very little luck doing that. We did end up hooking and bringing up two dog fish with that method (released), but not a single pink. We were marking fish all over the water from 75' up to 30' but just couldn't seem to get them to hit. I'm thinking that maybe it was simply a bit too dark that morning (heavy overcast) to be jigging that deep.

Anyway, we then switched over to mooching and began having luck pretty quick after we figured out some of the basics (this was the first time any of us had trolled the salt for pinks). Since we didn't have down riggers, we instead tied on 5 or 6oz banana weights followed by probably about 8' of line out to a white dodger (about 10" or 12" versions) followed by another 16" to a standard double hook setup with pink hoochie. Reel counters stopped at about 100' and 150' of line out. Once we started this method in earnest we had our first hookup within about 5 minutes and proceeded to have about a dozen hits over the next two hours or so before we had to head out.

We ended up with 4 pinks landed and about a dozen total hits for what amounted to about two hours worth of trolling with only two rods for most of that time. Funny enough, at one point our gear got a bit tangled (we were trying to run three rods simultaneously) but I had a fish on one of the tangled lines. Rather than letting it get away while clearing the mess I just started hand lining it in. I had it within about 10 or 15' of the boat and saw it thrashing under water before it finally threw the hook. It would have been awesome had I actually managed to hand line it and land it.

Hind sight being 20/20, I rate the day a four because the action was hot pretty much instantly after we got our technique down, and I am confident we could have limited had we known what we needed to do with the trolling right at daylight rather than messing around with jigs.

Tight Lines!

---