I've hooked sockeye on the Fraser, Vedder, and N. Fork Stilly; my opinion is that the biters were on the Vedder and N. Fork. I disagree with the Reiterman about those Fraser sockeye; line'em up! The water is so brown with so little vis; smokin currents - how could they see those size 14 corkies?

On the Vedder and N. Fork they're definite biters. I've hit them in slow moving deep pools, and in the case of the Vedder, on eggs under a float (fishing for springs, of course, since its not legal to fish sockeye on the Vedder). Pretty tough to line fish that way.

So I think it boils down to visibility; both water clarity and speed of presentation. In the slow, clear stuff, you can entice sockeye to bite. But in large streams with heavy currents and color, the fish are largely uninterested but are so bunched up that they're easy to line.

As far as lining them in (inside) the mouth? There's an old saying among fish biologists - teleosts suck and gape (teleost is latin for bony fish; suck and gape is simply sucking water through the mouth and out of the gills). I think depending upon flow, the size of the salmons mouth, and how fast the fish is breathing, the hook stands just as good a chance of getting sucked into the mouth before the hook set, as getting "lined" on the outside corner. Most of the kings I've hooked on the Fraser were inside the mouth, although I think they're lined. Kings just have big mouths. In fact, most of the sockeye were also hooked in the mouth, but the sockeye really sit on the slow edges of the king water, so the hook is not traveling so fast. When traveling in the main currents of runs, there is probably less chance of the hook passing through a sockeyes jaw so that it can be hooked inside the mouth.

My 02, whatever.