Fishing Updates

June 18, 2007

If you talked with the guests about fishing at Doc Warner's last week you could get two different stories--those who were in the right places at the right time had wonderful catches.  For others it was not as productive.  But that's just a typical fishing week regardless of the location.

Looking at the daily catches we saw the increasing numbers of fish available as the runs build.  For example: the king catch was steady at 2, 3, or 4 fish per day.  We took a total of 12 for the week.  I would classify the king fishing as OK, but not super.  We were up from 8 fish the previous week but we had a lot more fishermen on the water this past week.  Our largest king was 32 pounds.

Silver fishing is just getting started.  No silvers were caught on Monday or Tuesday.  Then we caught 1 on Wednesday, 2 on Thursday, and 11 on Friday.  The numbers tell the story of the increasing run size.  This number should dramatically increase during the next couple of weeks.

The number of chums in the area increased but the harvest was down a little from the previous week.  We had 96 a week ago and 84 this past week.  I'm not sure if the problem with the catch was that the fish were deeper or more time was spent fishing other places.  The daily chum harvest ranged from a low of 5 fish one day to a high of 34 the next day.

Pink salmon, like silvers, showed a modest but steady increase.  The numbers progressed from 0 on Monday to 10 on Friday, with a total harvest for the week of 23 fish.  We are seeing a lot more pinks jumping and the forecast for both pinks and chums is for large runs.

Halibut fishing was good.  We had several big fish taken, 147 and 157 pounds, and several in the 60 to 80 pound range.  One boat took 147, 80, and 60 pound fish on the same day.  The skill is being at the right location at the right time.  Every year about this time we see what I believe is an in migration of larger halibut.  There are lots of smaller halibut and catching is steady in many of the traditional fishing spots.

— Doc

Previous Reports:

• June 5, 2007
• June 11, 2007
• 2006 Fishing Season
• 2005 Fishing Season