New pedestal mounts for the down riggers have been installed on my new to me C-Dory TomCat, the riggers were re-wired with longer cords, the gear is tied, the reels will get re-spooled tonight and I'm on my way there on the first ferry out of Edmonds tomorrow AM. Will be fishing through the following weekend and will post the occasional results/images. Mostly will be fishing for chinook and coho with 2-3 days combined with some bottom fishing around Cape Alava. I'm planning on making one trip out to the deep blue 50-60miles SW of Tatoosh to see if I can scare up an albie or two.

I also plan to take some shrimp pots out and really scout the deep water on the outside. One of these days, I will locate spot prawns on the ocean side of area 4...

So if you're out in the area and see a CD-255 TomCat, give me a holler on the radio - "Meant to be" is the name of the boat. I monitor 16, 68 and 69. I'm always happy to share whatever intel I have on fish locations/successes while I'm on the water (at least in the ocean).

plugs and hootchies 180 - 230 feet down out on swiftsure for kings
coho on the rips NW of Tatoosh.

Fri: Arrived in Neah on Sat around 1PM. By the time the "stuff" was transferred from truck to boat, boat was launched, trailer rinsed, etc, we hit the water around 3PM and had lines in at Swiftsure around 4PM. Tomic plugs, white or white/green at 180-220 ft and we have 5 kings in the box in the first 90 minutes. Then it took another 90 to get our 6th fish for the limit. No big ones all low to mid teens. Back on the dock around 8/8:30. A great start to a 9 day trip.

Sat: We waited for another friend to arrive and were on the water around 10:00 with lines in around 11:00. Same gig, same place, same gear - slow. We landed one king in about 7-8 hours of trolling. About 5 hours into it, I got bored and put a line around 65-70 feet with a flasher/funky chicken Coyote on it. We pulled in 4 pinks.

Sun: Left the dock around 5:30 and ran to Swiftsure. Same gig again but started out a little higher in the water column as it was still darkish with thick fog all around. Scored one double around 7:30AM within a few 100 yds of J-buoy, but after that, nothing. Around 10:30, I was tired of the fog and no bites and the 8 y.o. boy we had with us was antsy. So we picked up for a trip down to Cape Alava. We stopped for 30-40mins on the NW corner of Table Top and trolled a couple of plugs and flasher hootchie combo and a herring in a rotator. We picked up one 8lb coho. Made it down to Cape Alava and fished a little south of Ozette Island. Loaded up on 40 rockfish, a couple of lings, about 8-10 kelp greenling and a 15# or so Cabezon. Lots of just sub legal lings. E.g. typical bottom fishing in the area.

Tomorrow is a salmon only day and regardless of how hot the bit is, we'll be off the water around noonish so we can rest, vacuum pack etc.

Sounds like a pretty good trip so far. Thanks for the report.

I bet the ride from Swiftsure to Cape Alava was a lot nicer in that TomCat than it was in the 22 Cruiser.

Goharley - definitely nicer (and FASTER) in the TomCat.

Monday report:

Much better day. Ran out to Swiftsure first thing in the AM and just fished for kings. Tomic plugs, 180-220' . Limited by 1:00PM - 6 chinook and 2 hatchery coho.

Photos to follow.

Here's some of the photos

My buddy's son Joe - fighting a king. He's 8 years old and loves to fish. For big fish, we give him the fighting belt.



A whale visited Monday


My largest king on Monday.

Tues Report: Tuesday was a tuna fishing day. This was the day I've longed for over many years. I had a C-Dory 22 ft cruiser since 2003 but late last year, a lucky opportunity came my way and I was able to purchase a C-Dory TomCat. The TomCat is a 25.5' Catamaran with twin Honda 135's, and a fuel capacity of 150 gallons. With the 135's, I can get 40MPH on flat water and can generally cruise at 20-25 in typical ocean conditions in August. I finally have a boat with the range to get me to tuna and the speed to do it as a day trip.

We loaded up with fuel on Monday evening and after taking care of buying ice etc on Tues AM, we left the dock around 7AM. At Tatoosh I pointed the boat due SW and engaged the autopilot. The water was pretty decent, 4' swells at about 11s with a little wind from the NW so we made 25MPH. After about 45 MPH we hit 63 degree water just off the edge of the shelf. The gradient in water temperature wasn't great - the temp slowly climbed for most of the trip - there was no sharp edge. Four lines went in the water, all were trolling tuna clones. We had lines in the water for about 15 mins when one of them went off. Let that one take line until the reel got low hoping that we'd pick up another, but no such luck. We had 3 short hali style rods but the 4th rod was a salmon rod. Of course the fish hit on the salmon rod. After an extended battle, the fish was at the boat and I was able to hold the leader to get the fish up close enough to gaff a 18-20lb albacore. One in the boat in the first 15 mins and the first on my boat ever! It looked like we'd have a great day.

Well, we trolled for another 6-7 hours without a hit. We never saw a large flock of birds hitting the water and we never saw a school of tuna near the top. We were in water as warm as 65.3F during that time. During the troll, the NW wind had come up a bit and there were 2-3ft wind waves on top of the swell. This made it a bit more difficult to troll and reduced the ability of the fish below to see our our offerings. The 8yo was getting tired so we turned our troll back towards Tatoosh with the intention of trolling until the water temp went down to 59-60F. When we got to the SW end of the Juan de Fuca canyon and the temp was at 61F, two lines went off and we landed two more albacore. These guys were bigger both were a little shy of 30lbs. We trolled for another 20-30 mins without a hit. At this point it was around 5PM and we decided to call it for the day.

We didn't land a ton of tuna but for my first attempt, I was pretty pleased with the day. Each adult got to land one fish (the boy isn't strong enough to attempt this yet) and we gained some experience in gaffing, bleeding, preparing an ice/sea water slurry to rapidly cool the fish and cleaning the bloody mess off the deck. Here's a couple of photos from the day.

On the way out, we came across a bunch of humpback whales that were feeding. A pod of Orcas we there also and it appeared that they were competing for the same food source. There was another group of humpbacks a few 100 yds from this group and there was an Orca there too.







I only took one shot of the albie - here that is. Not a great shot - camera phone.

Decent first trip.

That's f'n awesome. That fighting belt on a young kid is a pretty neat idea.

got any more pics of your boat. Sounds interesting

Achewter - pictures of the boat can be found at this link. I also put one photo of the boat at the bottom of this post.

Thursday - we went out to Swiftsure again. On the way out, my net blew out the back of the boat on the way out. I had it in the rod holder on my downrigger and it tipped up and dumped the net. It was a 3 year old knotless Frabill and the knotless nets have a lot of wind resistance. Since I had the down rigger pointing forward, the wind force on the net flipped the down rigger up and tossed the net out. Noticed the rigger up, but didn't see it happen. DOH! My error. Not to be deterred, we fished without it. We released the wild coho outside the boat as always. Once we had a clear ID on the salmon that were legal to keep, we simply swung them into the boat with one quick motion by grabbing the line by hand. We landed our limit of salmon with 4 kings (largest around 18lbs), 4 coho and 4 pinks. We lost two big kings to the sea lions. We released about 16 coho to get the 4 legal ones. This was the most coho I had seen on the trip.

Friday - Given the large amount of coho we saw at Swiftsure on Thurs while targeting kings, we decided to fish for coho at some of my favorite coho spots - Table Top, Limp Spot, the other sea mount just south of table top, etc. We didn't really find any coho and landed just one pink. While we could have switched up can gone deep for kings, we had one line deep and had only one or two hits on it (wild coho). So we went bottom fishing. It was a bit windier than I like so it was hard to keep the drift slow enough to effectively fish for rockfish but we knocked out about 15 rockfish, one cabezon and one keeper ling cod. Not bad, but not great. Regardless, it was a great day with great people and that's really what this is all about.

After fishing hard for 7 out of the last 8 days, we're pulling out this AM. We're tired, the freezer at home is already loaded with fish I sent home earlier and I'll have the weekend to clean to boat back up.
When I get home, I'll post a few more pictures.

Did C-Dancer ever make it out there with you?

Goharley - no - C-Dancer didn't make it. He changed his plans. We got home today at 5PM. I'll get the boat cleaned up tomorrow and have it ready for a late August tuna trip at Westport.

Sweet report.
Too bad about your net. Some times Davey Jones needs his payment.

I came home early on Sat. The Hood canal bridge was open so I had to wait in line for 15 mins or so. I was happy contemplating how good the fish I caught would taste. All were quickly bled, iced and ultimately vacuum packed and frozen.

Just in front of me was a black pickup truck. It was just under 80F outside and the sun was beating down on us. In the pick bed was a bucket with the tails of about 4 pink salmon sticking up over the tail gate. No ice, not covered. As I sat there I could see the edges of the tails were drying out and starting to look like the ones you see on a shellacked mount. I was driving me crazy to watch this. Then the redneck got out of his truck and opened the cooler to retrieve an icy cold Gatorade. As he passed by the fish baking in the sun, he sprinkled about 8-10 drops of water off the outside of the bottle onto the fish, looked at them with a satisfied look and got back into the truck. I damn near died laughing.

Well, at least he didnt use downriggers to catch em.