Drifter,
Cool to hear your searun stories. I’ve caught some nice cutts out of the Chehalis system while salmon and steelhead fishing.

In my younger days before I started fly fishing, we used to fish for them in the sound trolling. Gear of choice was a trout rod, spinning reel, a 1/4 to 1/2 Oz of weight and those little firecracker herring which we cut plugged.

We always made sure you could see bottom off both sides of the boat.
It was fun to be able to see the cutts come up and attacked the herring as it spun behind the boat.
SF