May 20, 2022 - It's been a long time since I fished from my kayak and I headed down to my local urban lake to do a shakedown cruise. Lots of little ducklings and goslings to watch and a couple hours of paddling put two hatchery rainbows into the cooler. Somehow in the excitement of the first fish I managed to snap off a foot of my very first fishing rod... And that kind of detail is how I'm going to finally catch up on my homework!
June 3, 2022 - A WDFW email notified me that the Cascade River Hatchery had their allotment of king salmon breeding stock and that the river was open for fishing. Of course, the day I had free saw a major rainstorm the night before and even the hatchery's creek was overflowing its banks. Still, I'm a sucker for hopeless quests and headed out at 3:30am to find a father, son team already had bonked two kings within the first few minutes of daylight (or maybe well before).
I felt my jigs tap a couple fish but I don't think I had any real bites across my four hours of effort. Folks around me did ok so I could celebrate vicariously. The heavens opened up and I decided heading back to my chores didn't sound too bad.
July 28, 2022 - My annual summer crabbing trip features the blog debut of a new and improved camera! I crushed the old screen while wrestling with the boys and upgraded to a camera that can actually focus on my target with at least an attempt at keeping up with the awesome WA scenery.
This is also the first trip where I had left the ring pot at home and had two traps to deploy which gave me more time for paddling around and lounging on shore (ring pots can get stripped of bait in a hurry and then the crabs just step back off your ring). I don't know why but this particular spot is almost always overflowing with crab: is it because the habitat is excellent or because the hand launched flotilla can only paddle so far and that small radius means we make one mega oily stink cloud that draws them in?
The crabbing was very productive although it started with a double bust. First, I found what looked like an illegally rigged crab pot that just had some foam and wood tied to an unleaded line (bad news for boat impellers). I tried to drag it up but even leaning far over the other side of the kayak, I was barely bringing it up. Not wanting to dump myself for a silt filled trap, I tied it off to the boat and started the slowest paddle to shore ever witnessed. When I finally got to shore I started dragging up the cord and then it became twine and then I beheld a ... rock!
After freeing the rock from its prison, I trashed the lines and headed back out to my first pot which had one, barely legal, red rock crab after a two hour soak. An unbelievably poor showing for this beach but I was spared a dungy shutout because all the crabs were sitting in my other pot 50 yards away (exact same bait in both - pink salmon carcass, razor clam guts). They weren't as heavy as the rock but that much weight in an awkward shape meant I was again paddling to shore at a snail's pace. In this case, that is a literal statement. I didn't want to let the crabs out of my sight so I held them in one hand and tried to paddle with the other.
I had to put back a full limit of legal crabs but I got to keep five monsters for the cooler and the boys were very impressed, even if they still don't believe the giant spiders are edible. And so concludes a very quiet summer fishing wise, I'll look to improve on my performance come the fall.
