We fished Neah Bay 1/2 day thursday, all day Friday & morning of Saturday. Only brought home 3 kings for the boat plus the normal sea bass bonanza (all ya want).
We caught a handful of silvers but released all of them. Results were fairly typical & better than most (if they fished inside anyway).
Biggest king was 18+ lbs. Results were pretty slow for just about everybody we spoke to plus the fish are almost all small. Very few fish over 20lbs being caught yet. We saw one nice one that was near 30# caught in front of Waddah but it was an anomaly. Ralph the fish cleaner & the WADF fish checkers all had seen very few larger fish. Best location was at Umatilla based upon our results plus talking to many others. I only ran into one boat that claimed to have caught more than a single fish inside, everyone with multiple fish had run down to Umatilla (one other to Port Renfrew side). We decided not to run down there Saturday as the winds came up and waves were getting nasty even in the morning, chose not to get a 1.5 hour pounding running down there, so we ended up only fishing inside Tatoosh Saturday, which no doubt effected our results. On a side note, fishing pressure was the lightest I have seen in July in the last 7 years. On a holiday weekend I expected a lot more fisherman. Businesses were really hurting. The Cape camground was only half full at most as well as the marina. I noticed also there were very few boats returning from Canadian waters with the normal halibut & bottom fish smorgasboard. I have to assume the high price of gas this summer is the culprit for the much lighter turnouts. I know for me I was out around $500 for gas for the truck & boat combined for the trip which makes for some pretty pricey fish & chips tonight!

I hope the real reason for no preasure is because people are finally doing what they say they were going to do the last few years. We will stand by and see how many say they will be one to boycott Neah Bay and the Makahs again this year then forget what they said and follow up with there reports.

Thanks for the report !

We stayed home this year because of the fuel prices. Between the 30' travel trailer and the 21' boat it would have been over $700 with the boat fill up. We're going to do more salmon fishing closer to home this year.

Great Report. I used to fish the Neah Bay area a lot and smaller fish were pretty common about now. The bigger columbia river kings would start to come through about the third week in July. This is if the run timings are on time and not out of whack. My biggest early king was a 30 pounder the second week of July.

nice to here someone fishing up there, low pressure is nice but i like to here reports. was thinkin about going up this weekend for some lings. maybe a salmon or too. i heard sekiu is on fire. might have to stop and try it on way up for halibut as well

Nice report.Good luck,
STRIKE ZONE

did you do any ling fishing? like to make the trip up in the next week or too. sounds like not alot of pressure, maybe things will pick up if the king fishery inside picks up?

No, we didn't target lings. We picked up several while fishing for sea bass, and a couple when I went in real tight for salmon. 2-3 were barely legal but I threw them back. Too much waste when they are that size so didn't want to kill them. Only saw a few lings at the cleaning station, nothing over 6-8 lbs though. Like I said, not many anglers targeting bottom fish those days, was really strange to see so few people doing it and only a couple of boats that went to Canadian waters for halibut & lings