ANGLERS HAVE A three-day stretch to hunt for that final halibut of the season as the flatfish fishery is on today through Saturday along the Strait of Juan de Fuca and off Neah Bay and La Push.
Added halibut fishing days were announced for the coast last week and Friday’s fishery was put on the schedule earlier this week for Marine areas 1-10.
High quota poundage coupled with numerous poor weather days made adding more time on the water an easy choice.
This higher quota will be in place through the 2022 season, so odds are these longer seasons will continue in the near future.
In devising the fishing schedule going forward, it would be nice for anglers and resort owners to have more advance notice for planning and scheduling purposes. Possibly building in a couple of back-to-back fishing days instead of the Thursday/Saturday or Friday/Sunday scheduling could help.
In-season catch management is a moving target and it’s easier to remember the normal day-on, day-off halibut schedule, so I wouldn’t expect much to change.
A coho-heavy summer
The earliest data on the ocean recreational salmon seasons hints at what fish managers and angling experts expected: banner hatchery coho catches.
Kings were in the mix too, but more coho were caught and counted during the first two days of the summer salmon season off Neah Bay last Saturday and Sunday.
“A total of 705 anglers participated in the salmon fishery June 22-23, landing 58 chinook and 229 coho,” Fish and Wildlife ocean salmon manager Wendy Beeghley said.
Those catch totals account for 1 percent of the area’s chinook guideline of 5,200 and 1 percent of the area hatchery coho subquota of 16,600.
La Push anglers did not fare well in the weekend opener with 62 anglers catching one chinook and no coho.
La Push and Marine Area 3 has a 1,100 chinook guideline and a 4,050 hatchery coho area subquota.
Quilcene’s Ward Norden, a former fisheries biologist and owner of Snapper Tackle Co., has a tip for those fishing far offshore for chinook.
“One of the Makah [commercial] trollers asked me where to look for chinook since he was having trouble finding them,” Norden said. “I told him to hang up a 50-pound downrigger ball and one spread of hooks to get down around 400 feet or deeper. When the plankton driven surface ecosystem isn’t doing well such as in an El Nino, chinook will go deep to feed on squid and lanternfish. A 6-inch Silver Horde plug in pearl with a pink stripe always seemed to do well down deep for some reason.”
Future returns
Norden has been busy making observations for next year’s coho returns and future chinook returns and is worried with what he sees.
“I am not liking what I am seeing in regards to plankton productivity,” he said. “All the good things I saw earlier have reversed. On top of that, the Makah trollers are telling me that for the first time in memory, the outer banks of the Strait of Juan de Fuca are inundated with humpback whales. That is serious competition for an already scarce plankton resource and the whales like to eat young salmon feeding among the plankton such as coho and sockeye.
“I can barely speculate what the result will be at the moment.”
Fly Fishers meet
A long-delayed presentation on fly fishing in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho will be offered at Monday’s meeting of the Olympic Peninsula Fly Fishers (OPFF).
The group meets at the Campfire USA Clubhouse in Webster Park, 619 E. Fourth St., at 6 p.m. on the first Monday of each month.
Originally scheduled for February, Chuck and Darlene Whitney’s off-Peninsula fly fishing presentation was snowed out.
The Whitney’s will share slides and discuss three subspecies of cutthroat trout.
Chuck Whitney also will demonstrate the Thunder Thighs Hopper dry fly, a foam fly devised for the Yellowstone River that is touted not to sink after repeated mouthings by trout. Developed by Eric Paramore in Livingston, Montana,Whitney said this fly can be used on some local waters.
Sequim’s Solas McGruther, age 13, also will discuss his experiences at The Northwest Youth Conservation & Fly Fishing Academy in Lacey.
McGruther expressed an interest in learning how to fly fish and OPFF sponsored his attendance at the academy, which runs through Saturday.
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Sports reporter/columnist Michael Carman can be contacted at 360-417-3525 or mcarman@peninsuladailynews.com.
