Today's plan was to be on the water before sunrise and fish until the Help Habitat Fundraiser. That plan was dismissed at 1:30am after a long dinner outing.
Chris phoned at 6:30am and woke me up. "Are you there yet?", he asked. "What...? Where?" "There!" "Where...?"
Back to bed until 9:30am, caught enough coho this season anyway.
The fundraiser today was... poorly attended IMO compared to the amount of people we see at our river cleanups. Oh well, these projects are set up to benefit anglers, so it's up to everyone if we wish to improve things. Once again, none of us won the grand prize... so off to the river I went.
The outing almost started out a very bad one. A bad outing doesn't mean no fish, it usually involves something bad happens. I decided to go for a wade at a usual spot knowing that the water was slightly higher, and that others have been wading across in the last two days. One step forward had water up to my waist and the current started picking my feet up. I desperately trying to grab bottom. It took about 10 seconds, which seemed like 10 minutes, before I was able to secure myself without going for a drink. I was still not out of it at this point. The wade back to the starting point against the current took fair amount of time. I was quite relieved once I got back on shore. Complete carelessness it was.
With that excitement behind me, I chose to fish from the side of the river without crossing. Second cast with the big chunk of chum roe sent the float diving, but the sun glare delayed my strike so it was completely missed. Third cast, the float dove again but I was still not able to connect. On the fifth cast, I was able to hook up. It turned out to be a jack chinook.
The rest of the afternoon only saw several chum salmon landed, and one adult chinook around sundown. Water condition could not be better, Coho salmon were either not where I was or not so interested except at first light when Chris and Lew fished it.