Elkrun said:
Can someone copy that story JD linked to here. I cant go on the old site to read it and I'm really curious!
Thanks.
[Originally posted by Fishnut 8/18/07]
Hi everybody, We had a great time in Westport. My brother in law used to come up with me and fish every year at Neah Bay or Lapush. He hadn't been here in two years. I told him to wait and come in August to Westport for hog Kings. the outlook has been really bleak. I guess the week before last was the best week for kings this season but died off fast. We3 searched hard for kings and no luck the first few days. Radio was dead for kings.
Last Sunday we went straight out and was solid wild coho. Four downriggers going non stop. 60-70 wild coho and finally boated a hatchery coho. Some of our friends weres down there to on the radio. Same problem. One finally got into the hatcheries later on that afternoon. We got a 10# king to go with that one hatchery coho.
Monday ran way north to try and find a new run of kings with only 10-12 pounders and 4 nice hatchery coho. Put over 100 miles on the boat that day. No big kings.
Tuesday was getting disappointing as was everyone else on the radio-no kings. We went south and went into solid red Jellyfish. Could not get out of them and headed west. No luck. Lots of bait with small coho. Went north and worked hard to get a few coho. We decided to go out into deeper water to look for kings. We stayed hard at it and slow was the word. I got a 10-pound chinook, but nothing special. We kept working some bait balls hard and finally my brother in law hooked into a line stripper and lost it. All other boats had gone in and we were by ourselves late in the afternoon. My wife's (Jean) rod went off with a running king. We cleared all four downriggers out of the water and got ready to make sure this one didn't get away. I netted it and it was 30 pounds. I got her spoon and gear back in the water and got the other three back in and bang, she nails another one. Its a 17. I had gone back too my old tactics of the big spoons and really long leader. I tied another spoon of the same on and put it on the other side and in 5 minutes it hit. This was a hog this time. It took off for the ocean. I told my brother in law to take it. He took it and 40-45 minutes later with a lot of circling the fish in the boat, I got it in the net. It was a 40 pounder 40.5 inches x 28 inches, he was pumped!
I started to put the gear back down and they told me we had our 4 kings. I forgot about the little king I had gotten before. So we headed in. What a great day it turned out to be. What a great day it turned out to be. No one else got into kings and we hit it right. Told a few back at the campground where to go. I guess they got the word out as others were in our spot with us the next day and some other 30s were caught.
Went back to the same spot on Wednesday and late after noon the bite came on again. My son, Jon, got a 30 and we got some 20-25 pounders. It sure was fun to get into the kings. Where we were, we stayed all day and the water warmed from 59 degrees to 64.5 that day. How weird.
Thursday the water was really bad, no one was going out. Forecast 15-25 knot winds in the late afternoon. We decided that maybe it was not to bad out past the end of the bar. We got out into about 195' feet of water. The winds were there early. We tried the kicker and got it to stay in the water with the 4-6 foot wind chop. We pulled up and ran to 250' of water again and the weather kicked up so I could not keep the kicker motor in the water other than going NE. Bagged it and came in.
Friday night and morning lots of rain and wind with worse forecast coming. We decided to come home. We felt really lucky as we got into some hogs when fishing was dead for kings.
