I fished Neah Bay from Sun - Thurs this last week. It was the slowest I've seen it in the 13 or so years I've fished there. On a normal year, I may fish there 20-30 times. I usually limit everyone on the boat every day except maybe one or two. This last week, we limited on only 2 days out of 5. The first day we fished down by Shark Fin. There were a number of commercial/native trollers in the area but we only managed one fish around 14#. Other than rockfish, that was the only bite we had. We fished bait behind flashers, spoons behind flashers, tomic plugs and hootchies at depth ranging from 120' -400' of cable and the area was basically a desert. Monday, we fished little prairie (the plateau just west of Tabletop) based on good reports there. The story was similar to the day before so we moved to Swiftsure after 2-3 hours. At Swiftsure, it was black mouth shaker after black mouth shaker. We went through dozens and by 6PM eventually limited on 6-10# chinook. In a normal year, the fish we kept would have been released. We hit Blue dot on Tues - it was also a desert and I think we got one 14# fish there.

Wed and Thurs we were resigned to just fishing Swiftsure. The shakers were far less abundant on those two day and we got 2 6-10# fish on Wed. and on Thurs a 6#, a 10# and 2 14# fish. Thurs was the only day we tagged out early - we were limited by 9:30 that day and had we not kept the two smaller ones we could have probably (?) found a couple more in the 14# range. All other days were full 8-12 hour days with very little to show for it other than a nice fuel bill. Once we had Swiftsure dialed is as best we could, by far the best producer was a Funky Chicken coyote spoon behind a green glow flasher fished at about 150' on the cable. Deeper and shallower were both attempted but the bite seemed best around 150' +/- 30'. The spoon outfished choked herring behind the flasher by a factor of 4-5. We had bites on everything we tried - plugs, other spoons, hootchies, bait - but the most effective by far was the coyote spoon.

We left with a reasonable amount of fillets of tasty chinook but far less than a normal year. Reports from the trollers indicate that the bigger chinook (most likely the Columbia run) are 45 miles offshore at the 90 fathom line. That's a long run for a couple of recreational chinook but I wish we had gone the extra 10-15 miles once we were already at Blue Dot.