Back Aboard Pacific Son


Coho Salmon
The summer King season closed on the 15th so Pacific Son came back to Juneau to provision and Marirose and I again changed places. She went off for a new adventure aboard her grandparents’ 48’ trawler in the San Juan/Georgia Islands and we headed back out for 3 weeks of Coho fishing off shore.

Besides food and water for crew and fuel for the boat, we need to have plenty of ice to keep our catch cold. That means we had to go to the Alaska Glacier Seafoods ice house (who we sell most of our fish too) and fill up our totes and hold area with a ton and a half
Icing the boat
of crushed ice. Then we made the 2 day trip back out to the fishing grounds. From Juneau we head out thru Icy Straits, past Glacier Bay and into Cross Sound.

Now that we are targeting Coho we are setting lures every fathom and a half instead of 2 fathoms as we did for Kings. We are also using mostly spoons whereas we fished a lot of hoochies when we were King fishing. We are setting about 20 lures on each side of the boat – about 40 hooks in the water. We pull the gear about once every hour. It takes me half an hour to pull both sides plus an extra minute or two for every fish I land, so when we are hooking a lot of fish I can
Spoons
pull both sides and then start over again without any break in between.

Kings were worth over $100 per fish but Cohos are closer to $12. Thankfully, we land a lot more Coho then we did Kings. Of course, that means my muscles are now truly learning what it takes to fish, as I’m lifting 20 - 30 (5 – 10lb) fish out of the ocean daily and hauling them on deck. However, as my salmon sister Sarah says “it’s a good hurt”!
Tying up Hoochies


Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 1, 2018 at 8:12 AM

    You're back on the blog! We've been tracking you guys far (to me) out in the Sound. So good that you are getting into the fish - and getting strong(er). Love from us. Stay safe.

    ReplyDelete

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