I had an interesting conversation after my daily skunking down at Pt. Defiance this morning.

The guy working the ramp said a total of 7-8 fish came in all morning. Of these, 3 came from a single boat trolling and 2 came from a single fisherman jigging. All the other boats (I suppose aside from a few other one-off fish) were skunked. This seemed consistent with the 80/20 rule: i.e. that a small percentage of fishermen catch the vast majority of the fish.

I asked the guy at the ramp a few questions figuring if anyone could confirm the 80/20 rule he could. His responses surprised me. He said that a) he knows by face or boat all the guys who regularly fish that ramp and b) nobody consistently catches fish. He said some guys have a slightly better catch rate but for the most part it's "like the lotto." More often than not the experts are skunked and a first-timer comes in with his limit.

I've been fishing here since I got back to Seattle in January and I figure I average around 3 keeper kings for every 10 days on the water. Normally a low catch rate like this would bother me but I looked at the Pt. Defiance fish checker tallies and by my calculations, in the first two weeks of July the 594 anglers sampled caught a total of 78 Chinook. This would be an average of 1.3 fish per 10 angler days on the water, so I guess I can feel good about my catch rate if the first two weeks of July represent a normal average. Still, 7 skunkings out of 10 days fishing seems like a lot.

So after all that, here's a question to the board: Over the entire year in the sound, how many keeper size kings do you average out of 10 days fishing? (Really, no exaggerating!)