Northwest Fishing Reports

This is my second season on the sound and thought that I would try my hand at fishing from the boat. My first outing for pinks was extremely succesful, but the last couple of trips have been pretty lack luster. Perhaps my excpectations are too high, but I can't seem to shake the felling that I am missing something. I suspect that my fishing equipment is a large part of the problem.

I don't have downriggers, so I have been using a mooching style setup (6 oz canonball on a slider, 6 bead chain with a 4' leader, glow white Pro Troll flasher, 16 leader and a pink hoochie).

I have also used a Brads Bait cutplug with a 4 oz wieght.

I've been trolling between 1.5 to 2.5 mph.

I've got a Lowrance Elite 7 Sonar and have been marking fish, but they all seem to be at the 75 - 200 ft depth. I don't seen to mark fish very well in the top 50 ft of water, but then again I may not be reading the sonar correctly.

My boat is just a 14 ft Lund with a 15' tiller so my capabilities are somewhat limited. Poles are Lamiglas X-11 LH90XHC and reels are Shimano Tekota 300's.

Any help or tips would be appreciated

You're going to be limited without a downrigger. Most of the salmon will be deeper than you can reach trolling with weights most of the time.

You will be able to get deeper if you use a deep diver of some sort rather than the weights, but you will never reach more than maybe 50ft at most unless you get a downrigger. You're also going kind of fast when trolling for pinks. See if you can slow down to 1-1.5 mph and troll with the current.

One thing about sonar that many people don't know or have trouble picturing is that the sonar generates a "beam" that works sort of like a flashlight beam set to a wide angle. When your 20 feet from a wall and shine the light on it, it might light up a circle 20' in diameter. So you could see all the fish in that 20' circular area. However, if you were just 5 feet from the wall, that same beam would only light up a 5' circle. So you would only see the fish that were within that circle. There might be fish 6 feet from the center of the circle, but you cant see them because they are not "in the beam". So there might be tons of fish 5 feet down and 10 feet of to the side of your boat and you will never see them unless you have a side scan setup.

Thats not really how it works, but its a good analogy.

Generally, lower frequency settings will reach deeper depths and give you a wider beam but with less fine detail. Higher frequency settings dont penetrate as far but give you a narrower beam with more fine detail.

I would just stick to an 18" leader from the flasher to a 2 inch pink hootchie. I wouldn't mess with the Brad's for another week or two when the coho start arriving more in the sound. What area are you fishing? When we fished possession bar two weeks ago we were only fishing in 35 feet of water and limiting out. The bulk of schools I've seen there and down in Gig Harbor this past weekend were in the top 40 foot of water. Make sure you're fishing the tide changes too, the pinks will hit off the tide too but moreso during the tide change.

Larry3215 - I kind of figured that I would be limited without downriggers. I've marked pretty solid groups of fish at 50' to 100'. 8 ozs of wieght isn't going to get me anywhere near that, especially with a flasher. I was considering using divers a few weeks ago, but they don't seem very accurate. I would probably just be better off purchasing some manual downriggers.

Great analogy on the fish finder technology.

jbball50 - I'm fishing north MA12 and as of today South MA9 near Salibury and Whiskey Spit. So far I have just been fishing the morning tide changes. Seems like the fish are a bit shallower in the morning.

You can almost always find manual downriggers pretty cheep on Craigs List. People get tired of cranking pretty fast

Yeah, the salmon tend to go deeper as the light increases.

Edit: we started out years ago with just sinkers for trolling. Then moved to divers and realized they dont go deep enough either. So then we built some homemade downriggers and used them for a couple of years. The hand cranking got old faster than we got old - or maybe the cranking made us older faster - so we tried some store bought manual downriggers. We only used them about 6 months. Ours were easier to crank!

If you are thinking we are some serious cheapskates, you would be correct! All that cranking however loosened up the purse strings and we now have two Cannon electric riggers on the boat and a nice deep cycle to power them. Our upper body strength is lagging but we are happy fishermen again

I have trolled from a 16' Alaskan tin boat in the summers up in BC for years and have tried dozens of combinations of methods to get my gear down...with the manual downrigger I use now absolutely the best. Rigging the electrical for an electric downrigger is going to be a drag and ask a lot of the starter battery you probably have on your Lund. I use a smaller Penn hand crank with 10lb balls on it and a long arm to keep the lines out of the prop. It has a swinging base which I highly recommend for getting the clips on and the downrigger out of the way when you want to jig/mooch. If you think that you may want to convert to electric downriggers down the road, make sure that the base you use is compatible with both manual and electric models. I bet Scotty makes them, I just use Penns because they're what we use to use on our bigger boat before we switched to Scotty electricals. Make sure that you mount the downrigger base really, really solidly on your Lund. I have a reinforced plate that comes off the gunwale of my boat. Before I used the downriggers we used planers, which sucked for all the reasons you stated. With one downrigger it is nice in the small boats because you're often fishing solo or maybe with other person, and you can put another line in the water that is closer to the surface. I'll run the downrigger down anywhere from 60-140 feet and have the other line either with only a banana weight and a spoon or (my favorite) only a bucktail fly dragging behind for Coho. PM me if you have any other questions. Sounds to me like the cannonball+flasher would be a lot of drag to be reeling up with a fish on...you're gonna be stoked when you get a downrigger and it takes the weight out of the equation when you're playing a fish. You could also try getting rid of the flasher now and that would make for a better fight than what you're setting now. In 20-40ft of water pinks will hit a lure without a flasher.

Bust out the jig stick. Work the fish vertically and then you don't have to worry about all this other stuff ;)

Larry3215 is spot on with the fish finder reasoning. Another thing you can do is to switch to a lower frequency such as 77khz or 50khz which will make a wider beam and should improve the shallow fish markings. Without downriggers, I would advise ditching the full size 11" plastic flashers, and run a 8" white metal dodger. The dodger will allow your gear to run deeper since there is less surface to create drag. The setup will look like this: main line - 6oz banana weight - 2ft of 20-30lb mono - white dodger - 16" of 30lb leader to 2" pink hoochie and qty 2 2/0 red gami hooks. The weight will be plenty enough to get down to where they are at around 20'-30'.

Thanks for all of the advice. Looks like the best bet would be manual downriggers. I need to start looking around!

Lots of great advice and varied stories in here. Thanks guys and ((((((Fish On))))))

With no downriggers it is even harder with Silvers since they like a fast troll, 3mph or more. With Silvers, prob just stick with plug cuts, 8 oz weight or more and toss the flasher, too much drag that fast with no riggers.

I have had pretty good success using a Deep 6 with a dodger and lure, at 45-55 pulls. You won't get deep deep but it will drive it down around 35-40 feet which will produce coho.