Ok gang, I’m not sure where to go with this one. On a request, Sunday I had agreed to take a friend out to learn the ropes as applicable to the Bellingham Bay Fishery. The fishery is a sub-fishery of MA 7 and even though MA 7 is closed to all salmon fishing the Bellingham Bay Fishery is open for Chinook and all other Pacific salmon species. The fishery is a hit or a miss fishery but most fish you do manage to slide the net under are braggers. Truth or otherwise I’ve heard that many Frasier River fish will stage along Lummi Island. Although smaller cookie cutter fish, there could also be both Samish River and Nooksack fall fish in the mix.

It has been my experience that even though there is a lot of salt real estate between the fishing areas and whichever river may be involved, the area is a terminal fishery. You need to hit it early and chase suspended meter marks. Your ramp options are Cornet Bay, Washington Park, Swinomish Channel and either one of the 2 launches on Bellingham Bay, Squalicum Harbor or Fairhaven. I decided to depart from Cornet Bay and make the run in the dark.

After a quick stop at Holiday Marker for a top-off of non-ethanol go juice, I met the days fishing buddy at the ramp and we were underway by 4:30. My plan was to be on station in the dark. Plan but not reality…

As soon as we went under the Deception Pass Bridge, we hit heavy fog and a rolling sea. I have made the trip out of the pass in dark, foggy conditions many times and never had an issue. Sunday was a different story and maybe there was a lesson in there somewhere. For all my “offshore” trips I run my Lowrance HDS 9 with the fish finder and radar on the screen and then a separate 9” tablet with a Navionics app for navigation. I do this for safety in redundancy and to have a separate larger screen to navigate with.

As we got under the bridge the GPS started acting up so I switched my HDS screen to the chart capability with a depth window. The GPS on that was hosed also and we were now in a swirling flood current in the foggy darkness. To be honest I was not sure which way was up.
I switched the HDS back to the Radar/fish finder screen and started navigating via the radar returns and finally got out of the mess. The situation was a little hairy if not ought right dangerous. It was even weirder because by the time we were in the vicinity of Williamson Rocks the GPS issue sorted itself out. Lesson learned; keep your cool, have redundant navigation tools onboard and sometimes it is best to just wait for better conditions. Funny, while we were heading in, I looked at our “bread crumb trail” and I was shocked by our route out of the pass.

Under way but still foggy our forward progress was slow. We didn’t get on station until probably 7:30 and by that time our early morning bite was off. In that it was kind of a teaching trip I motored around and showed him some of the better spots and general layout of the area. Eventually we went gear down with hopes of a chance chinook encounter.

The entire day I never saw a meter mark that I would definitely say was a chinook. With the absence of meter marks, I targeted schools of bait between 60 and 80 feet in 90 to 120 feet of water, my usual fall drill. We caught quite a few humpies, all released but no chinook (if this was a pink report, I would have rated it a 5…).

We were running my usual chinook gear; 11” flasher, 42” of 30# fluorocarbon and a 3.0 or 3.5” Goldstar Kingfisher Lite Spoon or an Olympic Tackle fly with a herring strip. The gear was running approximately 20’ behind the release clip and our trolling speed varied between 3.0 and 3.6 MPH. Again, my eyes were glued to the fish finder all day and never did see a good meter mark.

Interesting trip; my friend now knows I’m nuts, can’t catch fish and well, nuts… That said, it was a great classroom trip. He learned the spots and how to fish the area, something that he will be able to take forward. He also went home with various technique, process and organizational ideas. I had told him ahead of time that it can be a hit or miss fishery but he was still game. I think that if we had arrived on station before first light, we would have found a fish or 2.

As a quick side note; mid-morning 15-20 seiners and a couple support boats moved into the area and were wrapping something but it looked like a cluster-boink so I stayed out of their way and didn’t see what they were catching.

---