Yesterday Lucky looked at me as if I was on crack when I said that I had not seen any chum salmon going through the Tidal Fraser.
He said that he saw plenty of them during the early hours of the incoming tide. Today I decided to return a few hours earlier to witness it myself. As soon as I got out of my car, chum salmon could be seen porpoising left and right. Dozens of them, which were going by in groups, would poke their heads up, show their dorsal fins, tail splash at times between 1:00pm and 3:00pm. I've seen this in previous years and was very sure that they would be tight lipped just like in the past. During those two hours, not a single chum salmon touched the spoon and spinner. To make things worse, just about all the fish that I saw were bright silver. At first glance, one might even have thought they were coho salmon.
While they were going through, I managed to hook a jack coho salmon that flew straight out of the water within seconds. While in the air, it spit the spoon back to me.
I hooked another one, either a big jack coho or a good sized adult coho, at around 4:00pm. This fish peeled quite a bit of line off the spool before spitting the hook. This time the fish did not even show itself.
The last hard tug came around 5:00pm, just before the end of the retrieve. The hook-up came up empty.
Once the tide changed around sunset, chum salmon began rolling again, but of course, none were biters.
It was a nice Thanksgiving outing nonetheless.
A couple of hookups under the warm October sun should not be taken for granted.
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Topic: Tidal Fraser River, October 12th 2008: Triple losses on Thanksgiving (Read 1808 times)