After the river level jumped up on Monday night, I found that it has spread the fish out quite a bit which is kind of nice. Good numbers of fish are found in all the runs so that's giving everyone a fair chance of some bites. Today I popped down to the river around lunch as my friend Iwan is visiting so I wanted to get him into some fish.
We started at a popular run in the lower river where others were having success at first light, Chinook salmon were thick at the head of the run while coho salmon could be seen hiding along the tailout. It was sunny and HOT, so I really wasn't expecting too much but after two casts with the spinning rod, a good sized coho salmon followed the Koho spoon and turned away when it reached the river bank!
We gave the run an hour of our effort without any result so we moved to the upper river. Fish could be seen once again throughout the run we picked. BIG chinook salmon were showing their dominance at the head of the run by these big rocks, while smaller coho salmon could be seen finning in the shallows. The first few drifts with roe resulted in several float-downs, which were all missed. I was pretty disgusted.
This basically continued for a couple more hours with the odd fish being briefly hooked. After going through the same water for so long, I decided to make a move to the tailout and proceeded to drift again. After a few drifts, this time the float took a solid dive and I had a good hookset into a nice coho salmon. It was a bright hatchery coho salmon roughly around 6lb. Once I got it to the beach, I thought to myself that finally Iwan can bring a fish home to eat. For some reason, I decided to drag the fish up by the leader.... Well, of course the hook popped out and the fish flopped itself back into the river as I attempted to intercept it. Now I was really disgusted by that performance.
I decided to retire the float rod and grabbed the spinning rod. A cast later with the Koho spoon, another coho grabbed it after two cranks on the spinning reel. This time I did not take any risks. Iwan netted the 5lb hatchery coho for me so we could dispatch it properly on the beach. With only 30 minutes of light left, we ended up hooking a couple more coho salmon, as well as some rather big chinook salmon to finish off a good and slightly frustrating day.
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Topic: Chilliwack River, October 11th 2019 (Read 5399 times)