Meat Fishing
- Thread starter Dekartes
- Start date
ARecher
Smolt
I stay pretty close to home but that has been working for me. Crabs (mostly dip-netted from shore), clams (occasionally), salmon from the salt (beach-caught--for smoking and eating), and a few silvers from the river (burgers). I'm the only one in the house who eats this stuff so I don't need as much as I can usually harvest.
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Pink Nighty
Life of the Party
These pics are from my favorite annual harvest, beach crabbing with my inlaws from kennewick. My brother in law does not eat crab but has been a true beach crabbing enthusiast. We plan their trip around the tides and usually scrape out a limit or two of dungees between 6 of us. This last year brought us to a new beach and the results were staggering. 6 limits of dungees and rocks, with dozens of legal keepers turned back as subpar.
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So I have never had a springer, are they really that much better than fresh-caught Puget Sound Salmon? I looked into doing it last year, but I was feeling a bit intimidated to jump into springer fishing madness without any experience. Especially given the way you troll with or against the river and current at bouy 10.
Pink Nighty
Life of the Party
Yes, they are that much better. No, it's not worth the gong show. At least not for me!
Columbia River spring Chinook is the very best salmon I have ever eaten. Period. If there is better salmon out there, I don't know about it. Puget Sound Chinook are nearly all of Green River hatchery fall Chinook origin. Fresh in from ocean feeding they are OK, but that's as good as they get, and they get worse as table fare the more days they are since their last ocean meal.
I have found lower Columbia (B-10) coho to be excellent eating, and Gray's Harbor coho too. There are too many places I haven't salmon fished that I can't comment on their table quality.
I'm also a snob for Fraser sockeye, the earlier the better. Bristol Bay AK sockeye are good too, but not as good as the Fraser fish that have longer migration runs and time between freshwater entry and spawn timing - that affects the lipid content of the flesh. (That is also what makes spring Chinook better eating than their fall counterparts. However, B-10 Up River Bright Chinook are fantastic table fare, just not as good as springers. And B-10 Tule Chinook are throw backs in my boat; we don't want them.)
I don't do much meat fishing, but when I do it usually involves a herring or anchovy as bait.
The Tule Stock is the ESA listed stock too right? So that keeps the fishery open longer too right?
YEah the tule stock is the listed one. They tend to come in earlier, so at least starting last year, they are starting to push the opening date back a bit to let more get through, which lowers the encounters. Hopefully they keep that up.
Yes, the wild Tules are ESA listed, but it's a management cluster fuck. The wild Tules are offspring of naturally spawning hatchery Tules. They will never recover because Tule spawning habitat is forever degraded and compromised. IMO it's a wasted effort. The Tule listing has shut down the sport season when there were URBs left to catch, but as Evan mentions, OR and WA have changed the season a bit to give anglers a bit more fishing time on URBs.
Yeah, the whole tule management thing always left me frustrated for the reasons you mention.
I did catch an absolute unit of one on the Sandy last fall though. By far my biggest ever.
We eat a lot of trout and kokanee. Trout go into sushi rolls or tacos, kokes go into all sorts of things. We make a good salmon burger and salmon salad with it. Our sushi rolls are utilitarian.
Stoked to see this thread. Honestly I was kinda losing interest in fishing and had one of those random ' why do you throw back the fish you catch' conversations with a co worker which got me thinking. Now I fish a lot less than when I was super into it, but the fishing trip extends into cooking and recipes as well as planning and fishing, and has me excited like I hadn't been in a while.
Stoked to see this thread. Honestly I was kinda losing interest in fishing and had one of those random ' why do you throw back the fish you catch' conversations with a co worker which got me thinking. Now I fish a lot less than when I was super into it, but the fishing trip extends into cooking and recipes as well as planning and fishing, and has me excited like I hadn't been in a while.
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Exactly!!!The effort some put in to tying flies is the effort I put in to my culinary endeavors
SeaRunner
Steelhead
Sounds similar to a lot of Puget Sound chinook stocks.
Puget Sound tributaries are seriously degraded, but many, if not most, can support naturally self-sustaining Chinook populations. Except the Stilly; it's toast unfortunately. Lower Columbia tribs that formerly hosted wild Tules are so modified, with upper reaches being all commercial timber tree farms. The siltation of redds is likely to prevent them from ever producing enough smolts to generate a spawner : recruit ratio of 1.
Dekartes
Kill Pebble Permanently
Knowing only that I haven't fished the Stilly in years, what contributes to it being 'toast'. Genuinely interested here. I should know more about my back yard and the areas that have been decimated. Maybe I should ask in a PM. This should probably go under the conservation thread.... I caught my first Salmon on the Skagit.
