November 9th, 2022: This salmon fishing trip was sponsored and organized by a long time friend and colleague from Grays Harbor as a sendoff from the business. As the date of the trip approached, our guide opted for the Humptulips and we met him dark and early for a very cold start to my first ever drift boat trip. It was cold enough to freeze our gear but even in the darkness we could hear the fish jumping and that has been scientifically proven to raise your body temperature (I'm pretty sure that is true, I just don't have the scientific journal reference handy).
The target for this trip were hatchery coho salmon and there were rumors of a lot of chrome bright fish ("snowbelly's" according to our guide) in the river. Unfortunately, high fishing pressure and low expected returns meant only one salmon could be retained per day. This normally wouldn't factor into my river selection as catching a single salmon without professional help is a rare enough event. However, on this trip we got into fish almost immediately just upstream of the Humptulips Hatchery. This happens to be the same little hole that I caught my first ever steelhead way back in the day (from the bank). Most of the fish we hooked into were of the dark red variety as well as a single wild chum that took me a good ten minutes to land. Jerm hooked into the only bright coho but it was a wild specimen and had to be released.
We picked up the anchor and headed through the boat chute to wave at the folks working the mouth of the hatchery creek.
For most of the trip we were fishing holes I had walked to in the past (primarily in the summer) but it had a completely different feeling both because of the water level and because we were catching so many fish. It took until the helicopter hole before we got into chrome fish and it was great to finally pull in our keepers.
We were exclusively fishing with spinners like the black/green vibrax shown below. That was excellent news for me because I have zero drift fishing skills and plugs or kwikfish are a little too passive.
As always, Jerm is the best guy to fish with as he still refuses to partake in glorious, fresh salmon so our family got lots of fillets, cured eggs for future salmon bait, and the carcasses for crab bait. A good thing too because this was the only successful trip I managed for the season.