I had a special treat today as I got to fish with my son James for pinks. The last time we fished pinks together was 09 when we got the skunk. James is in my first humpy video I ever made, our “Pink Salmon of Humpy Hollow” in 2007. It’s one of my favorite memories fishing with him and my brother Chris. Anyway, I was super happy to get to spend the morning with James and get him on some fish.

We launched at 6am out of Edmonds and ran up to just south of Picnic Point, and started jigging in 150 feet of water. Saw a few jumpers but overall pretty quiet, so after 15 minutes I told James “time to try a different spot” and we ran up about a mile north of Shipwreck and a little more in the middle of the channel. I decided to run one downrigger and James continued to cast a jig. This proved to be the ticket as he hit three fish, and we got one of them into the net. Fun times to see James hook up on a jig! Meanwhile the downrigger started producing, with 45-55 feet being the ticket. There are a lot of fish in the channel. Around 7:30 the downrigger exploded off the release and we hit a nice 5 pound silver at 55 feet which James reeled in.

Catching the silver got me thinking. It was 7:55am. We already had 5 in the cooler and had lost several fish, and now a nice coho. I decided to pull our gear and ran us over to the northwest corner of Possession in search of coho. Deep rod got switched to a green flasher and magnum green glow hoochie, shallow rod we kept with humpie gear. I increased the troll speed to 3-3.3mph and crossed fingers. It didn’t take long for more fish to start hitting our gear.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any coho. Just a ton of humpies. If you think the Hollow has a lot of fish, get ready cause there are still a lot of fish headed your way! The fish finder was constantly marking fish and we were hitting them at will at 55 feet of depth. These pinks are a bit bigger, and also brighter than the ones we found first thing in the morning.

We ended the day at 9:55am with our limits, seven pinks and one coho. I gave the boat a good cleaning and will likely wait a couple weeks for the pinks to clear out and then start targeting the coho in earnest. James had a fun time and I have a bunch of fish all vacuum-packed for him to enjoy. Ah, Puget Sound salmon fishing, what a great start to the season!

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