Bottom line: 10 anglers fished Friday afternoon till Monday morning and caught 33 Kings, 5 marked Coho, one BIG yellow eye and a chicken hali. A few low teens for the salmon, but the rest ranged 18-27. We had the luxury of culling the little ones ;-)

This was the 5th trip in a row (2nd during mid-August) for my crew. I bring a 21' Striper and the rest use the 16ft open alum boats from Duval Pt. Lodge. All salmon fishing was done right at Duval Pt, 200 yds from the lodge. (The YE and Hali were caught at the north end of Christie Pass.) All salmon were caught between 40 and 70 deep (60 ft is favored) in water anywhere from 65 to 250 ft deep. Successful terminal gear included:
• straight cut plug
• cut plug with hot spot
• glow green hoochie with big green hot spot (but no twinkle skirt, just the hoochie)
• apex's small pink/yellow and large blu/grn

Observations:
This was the best I've seen it here in a quite a while. Weather was pleasant, fog now/then and typical PM winds but you could easily fish again by 7:30 (after a little bbq fish, washed down with a proper glass of good scotch).

Tides make a diff but not what you think: of all the times I've fished here, no great number of salmon have been boated around the tide change. It's normally a couple hours after/before. My premise is that the salmon come in when the waters moving because it traps the bait up next to the wall during flood and eddy's them up tight on the ebb. Just my opinion.

Now the most fascinating bit of info. I fished our gear tight to the d-rigger wire (5 ft) because of the black box and because that method worked great 3 weeks ago in Ucluelet. But my boat was almost shutout the first two days, while the other boats were slaying them. I queried the other guys on lures, depths, speed, etc. We were doing EXACTLY the same thing! At one point I counted 6 boats within 100 yds all playing salmon, but nothing for us! Talk about frustrating. But I finally learned that one rod in each boat was invariably catching all the fish!? And then it hit me…it was the length back from the downrigger wire. They were clipping 20 to 100 feet back from the d-rigger. The guys clipping 40-100 back caught more than those clipping 20-30 feet back. We made the change on all the rods, but the bottom stack (I fished 4 guys, 2 lines on each d-rigger) is farther back so those rods caught almost all the fish. As Duval Pt. was the choice spot, producing nice kings all day long, everybody, and their closest 50 friends were fishing there…LOTS of gear in the water. So whoever had their gear farther back was the most successful.

This may be old news to some. Thanks for listening.

Whiskyfish....nice report. Thanks for sharing the details. Did you guys stay at the floating lodge or land based? I fished from Duval Pt Lodge last year, but didn't make it this year. We had decent success, but I wouldn't say it was smoking hot. Our most productive setup was plug cut herring behind a hotspot flasher @ 60'. As a side note, one day I got stuck with a boat that had one of the older Yamaha 2 stroke engines (basically same engine as I have on my own boat). I'm convinced there was an electrolysis problem with that particular boat/engine combination as I only caught small silvers that day.

LF,
10 of us managed to fit in one of the land lodges. They orginally planned to sell the floater and build more cabins on land. But now the entire operation is up for sale. The owners have been great, hate to lose 'em.

Bummer. Prices will probably go up too.

Hi, Sounds like you guys had a great time. We did good to countless fish to the boat. We fished duvall, Lower end of christie was hot for coho To bad you had to release them. I released the biggest coho i have ever caught their. I estimated around 22 pounds. We also hit castle, echo island. tried christie for hali but got skunked also tried off the airport and found nothing but dogfish, Making plans for next year allready.

Hey Troller,

I looked for the green/gray Alumaweld, only saw a NorthRiver. I've already booked the same weekend next year.

Yeah I saw him also. We pulled the boat out friday afternoon. and headed back saturday. I am going to call them next week and set it up again.