Fishing with Rod Discussion Forum
Fishing in British Columbia => General Discussion => Topic started by: RalphH on October 20, 2021, 09:07:15 AM
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I made my first foray of the season to the North side tributaries trying both Nicomen and the Harrison. Nicomen looks good and has a reasonable height for fishing. it's very crowded already particularly at the Norrish Creek access point on #7. Harrison is on the high side for bank fishing. For a system that was once bank to bank with rising salmon, particularly chum this time of year, it appears virtually empty. no where near as many anglers as there once was and it's most popular as a sturgeon destination. FN beach seining is underway on the gold course shore most week days afaik. Some good fishing spots are gone such as French Creek which has been 100% lost to a combination of erosion and RV/Marina development. what was once a excellent beach area where I caught many cutthroat, coho and chum over the years is now surrounded by chained boom sticks to keep drifting logs off the boat wharves. Just last year i was able to walk up there and catch a few fish. This year I had to wade the whole way up and back and negotiate around a myriad of dead falls that have fallen off the eroding cut banks. There was once some great flats there that had prolific weed growth, schools of stickleback and sometimes good number of feeding cutthroat. These are mostly gone. River channel shifts? Dredging? I didn't see a sign of a trout, anywhere. I did catch a chunky Pike Minnow though!
Still if one walks around at either location and knows the spots success is possible. I brought home these, landed a wild and lost another in the space of 30 minutes.
(https://i.imgur.com/DHsaOkC.jpg)
Of course with my terrible fish id skills I have no idea what these are or if they are even edible. I hope it was legal for me to kill these. What to do? Any suggestions? :D
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Fished north side tribs to take a break from the vedder last week and it was a bit early but still got into a couple cohos. Hopefully it comes to shape within the next 2 weeks.
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Nice catch! A buck and doe by the looks of it. I tried the Nicomen slough last week by the Dewdney pub and came away empty. Didn’t see much of anything surfacing or rolling. Only a few shore anglers and one boat were there fishing the entire slough from the pub down to the boat launch. Last yr this time the slough was full of chum and coho. Hopefully things pick up.
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Those are strange looking chum...
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Those are strange looking chum...
The right one looks like a sockeye
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Good thing I didn't post photo of the baby tarpon.
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mistakes can happen. was fishing a north flow when a fellow netted a small 3lb coho and thought it was a rainbow and was going to release it. thinking it was a rainbow i had to go look. nope just a small hatchery buck coho.
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I know, I know, it seems crazy that I thought one might be a sockeye but if you saw the two of them side by side in person, it was hard to believe they were both the same species. They looked so different from each other. ID'ing fish from pictures makes it even more difficult because they rarely look the same in pictures as they do in person. Now I will simply ignore spots and ID based on other criteria. Never had any trouble ID'ing fish in the past.
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i find the easiest way to identify pacific salmon is by their mouths. i use tail markings and shapes as my backup. i wouldn't rely on spots because they that seems to change from fish to fish.
i think the hardest to tell apart is between a sockeye and a chum while targeting them in the ocean. they have very similar features.
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NVM.
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I know, I know, it seems crazy that I thought one might be a sockeye but if you saw the two of them side by side in person, it was hard to believe they were both the same species. They looked so different from each other. ID'ing fish from pictures makes it even more difficult because they rarely look the same in pictures as they do in person. Now I will simply ignore spots and ID based on other criteria. Never had any trouble ID'ing fish in the past.
I hope I didn't give you the impression I was making fun of your post about that. I was making fun of myself for suggesting it could be a chum. I wish there was a way to make it clearer for people who have trouble identifying species based on things like spots or no spots; black gums vs white gums. Only thing I can suggest is for people to study as many quality photos of the various species. Also be aware what are the common species in the waters you fish.
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Thanks for sharing the report Ralph
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No worries at all RalphH. Your comment read the way you intended and made me chuckle.
If only the fish could read, it says Koho right on my spoon!
;)