Is it steelhead time??? Fall wrap

[Amerman]

With the current rain, I am finally getting some time off again. The fall chinook season over all was good this year with the best news being just the overall massive amounts of jacks all year.




I think if we had ever targeted the jacks this year we could have caught our 5 per person jack limits a number of days.


Lots of days while fishing for large fish we just couldn't keep the jacks off the line.





This year was probably the most jacks I have ever seen or at least in the last 30 years.



Had some cool wildlife moments this year, seeing bear, bob cat, coyotes, elk, deer, otters, eagles and tons of others. But also had lots of crappy camera days that we got no pics or pictures that just didn't come out. We also had some days that we simply let most of our fish go.

Along with the massive amount of jacks, we also saw lots of big males this year


The largest one we kept was 47 pounds caught by Portland Timber goalkeeper Adin Brown. Adin middle below is listed at 6-5, 250 but was just huge. A bad camera day for me (I had camera problems a lot this year and just didn't get pics a lot of days)







The above 42# male is the largest I have ever landed as part of a triple. All three landed with this one taking the longest.



Some more big bucks.



With a two adult and 5 jack limit this year on most of the coast with no more than one being a wild adult, we had a number of days this fall we struggled to only get our native fish.








Limits were hard to come by this year but we got lucky and had a few.



Some days catching 20 or more fish is what it took to find all of our fish.



Lots of days this year we caught bonus fish and some days we even found hatchery fish on rivers that are supposed to have none.















As the season went on, we started seeing some steelhead in the mix, as bonus fish, often switching to steelhead fishing after getting our wild chinooks.





Very often after switching over to steelhead, we just caught more chinooks on steelhead gear, but some days we caught good numbers of steelhead too.



And a few early winter nates in the mix.




Still catching some jack salmon in Dec. as we fished for steelhead really showed how good the jack run was this year and how good the steelhead season seems to be starting. If I get the time this week I hope to put some videos together, I have lots of raw video from this fall I need to edit.


After a long fall chinook season, I know I am ready for some steelheading now, and I will be fishing steelhead once the rivers drop - Mid April. If you have an interest catching some coastal steelhead give me a call early as the season will book up fast. Also we have gift certificates available for anyone looking for gift ideas, or wanting to know what to tell people they want for Christmas