Spring has been pretty fun!

SkyGuy and I wrapped up April with a two day jaunt out to the coast to put a bow on winter run steelhead season, and got a little bit of everything while we were there.

Hailstorms that made us pull over and run for cover!



Followed an hour later by sunstorms that had us squinting after our lines...



And a very healthy dose of another kind of shiny to distract us from the weather and rowing...a dozen of these to end the season made for a very good time!



Bobbing around in the San Juans came quickly on the heels of steelhead season...and we were able to stack up enough of these big uglies to have a few meals already and few more to go!





I'd post up a pic of the halibut I caught with APKD only it didn't stick around long enough to make it into the boat or onto our plates In a dozen halibut trips over the past five or six years I have managed to get two bites, resulting in zero fish landed...the only halibut I've caught in that time was caught while trolling for salmon, and it wasn't open for retention, of course!

Jigging for lingcod has other advantages, too...like the cabezon APKD caught (and I ate )...lots of other ugly and spiny things to catch and release, including a Canary Rockfish, the first one of those I've ever caught. No pics, back to the depths post haste.

After watching Joe Quiocho's daily posts of big kokanee I was lucky enough to get in on a day of that with him and Parker...see his post about it for his pics, here are a couple more that I took.

Four boots, four shiny ones, and Parker's finger...



We're both wearing size 12 boots...the smallest of those kokanee was 14 inches, the other three were in the 17 inch range...and made some fantastic dinners for me and my lady.



Yesterday bass pro Nick Berto and I hit a local lake and had a blast with the bass...a couple dozen smallmouth from one to three pounds, a few non-target species (namely rock bass and jumbo perch that thought our big spinner baits were dinner sized), and a couple of these bucketmouths:

Nick with a 3 1/2 pounder that got pretty wily in the pads:



...and me with the second biggest bass I've ever brought to hand, weighed out at 7 pounds on the nose on the digital scale!



Here she is being sent back to make baby ditch pickles soon!



For those who are into that kind of thing...she was caught on a whackky rigged motor oil flake Senko on a 1/4oz. weedless jighead

The smallmouth were a mix of pre- and post-spawn fish, though most had already spawned judging by the clouds of smallmouth fry we saw around the docks...the largemouth had not yet spawned and were very few and far between, but if we're only going to get two the two we got were awfully nice.

We started out the day with a great double on two pound smallmouths, Nick will have to get me the pic of those as it's on his camera.

With a pile of work to do today, and yardwork on the agenda for tomorrow, Sunday is the next day to get at it...and Sunday is June 1st, so it's back to steelhead time!

With local salmon fishing, crabbing, Neah Bay, Willapa Bay, Buoy 10, Grays Harbor, and offshore albacore fishing on the schedule over the next few months, and steelheading in between, it's going to be another glorious summer and fall in the Pacific Northwest!

Cap off the summer with a couple of weeks chasing monster steelhead in northern B.C., then back home for river coho into December...and what do you know? Winter time again...and back to winter runs

I may even find some time to shoot at a deer and an elk in there somewhere for the first time in quite a while...

How can you not love living around here?

Fish on...

Todd