Coho Limits in Mid September

Weather and Tide Conditions

I got out late morning and only had a short window of time (roughly 2 hours). The wind was ok to poor, it was roughly 5 to 8 knots when I got on the water and stayed around that for the 2.5 hours I was out there. I was there roughly 9:00am-11:30am, essentially low slack tide and then the start of the new flood tide.

Following the Birds for Direction

Whenever I get out on the water, I always have a pregame idea of where I'm going and what I'll be doing. Meaning I have a direction in mind, a fishing tactic and plan. However, that plan is not concrete as I always am open to audibles based on nature clues that occur. This particular morning, I was planning on heading to a popular section of water off Neck Point park, BUT I saw a ton of birds hitting the top of the water in the opposite direction.

Seeing large amounts of birds on the water is a great sign. It means there's bait on the surface and if there's bait, there's likely salmon and other predator fish around. This bait on the surface was not a shock either as it's low-slack tide and when there is little current the bait will rise up throughout all areas of the water columns. When the tide starts ripping again the bait usually gets back down into structure areas for protection.

First Drop was a good one - A bite on the Turn!

Anyway, I decided to troll directly toward the birds. I dropped my Gibbs Kingfisher spoon "Glow UV Chartreuse Pink Green Black" down to roughly 100' down and based on my video time lapse it only took just over 2 minutes for my first bite. If you watch the video (see YouTube video at bottom of this article) you can see I turn my kayak moments before the bite. Often salmon will follow your spoon for quite awhile and not bite, but when you turn the spoon slows down or changing direction triggers the salmon to bite! I've seen this behaviour countless times on my underwater cameras. That said, I often troll around in "S patterns" to get those bites if Salmon are following.

Found a Bait Ball so I brought out the Spinning Setup

If you follow me at all, one of my favorite ways to catch Salmon is by vertical jigging. So when I come across shallow bait balls on the sounder, I often will break out the spinning reel and rod and drop a jig (typically a Lil Nib Irish Mint Glow). 

At this point in the morning the tide had picked back up and it was hard to keep my jig to drop vertically and keep over top of it. The wind and tide were both moving the kayak and bait in different directions and this can make for challenging jigging in the kayak. However, the Old Town PDL kayak allows me to move both backward and forward with my feet (via pedal drive) so I'm constantly utilizing this and trying to stay over top of the bait ball. 

Anyway, even with the challenging conditions I was able to get into at least 5 or 6 more Coho that morning. The first one I caught was another hatchery Coho so I bonked that immediately and that made my limit of 2 for the day. I could still retain a Chinook so I kept on jigging. 

Jigging Tactic of Reeling in as fast as possible

One thing I love to do is reel my jig in as fast as possible. So I drop it down and reel up without any movements, just full on speed. A lot of times, I'll see Coho follow and crush it right before the surface. It's an exciting thing to see and gets the fish all riled up. If you're having a tough time jigging and you know fish are around and not biting, try that tactic to switch it up. On this particular morning, I even saw a big Chinook chase my jig up to surface and took 2 big swipes at it. Unfortunately nothing stuck this time, but it certainly got the adrenaline going!