Austin Powers Exhibit 2.0: The Curious Case of the Sassy Tweenage Chinook Salmon
Logan
5/31/20262 min read
Thursday May 28th AM Outing
Well, as many of you are aware, I do have a tendency to fish on lots of different boats! I always enjoy my outings aboard Austin Powers. Austin Tyndall and I had a little thing going on at the Pierheads last July and August, and our first outing a little over a week ago resulted in a 3 man limit by 9:52. So naturally, we all had high expectations. There were 2 problems with this whole situation. Problem A was that our fish off the projects went full on Houdini on us. Likely off to greener pastures and a massive cornucopia of super alewives. Anyway, for whatever reason they up and left us. Problem B was that we had just had 2 days of sustained North Winds meaning that running up and fishing the Bank was going to be a crap shoot. Maybe there would be fish around, but maybe the water would be too cold and there wouldn't be. And if there were pockets of fish up there, are they in the double Zeros in 60 feet, or are they in the 7s in 220 feet? The point is, we likely would have to cover some water to find fish and we didn't have a super long window to fish. Dylan's buddy Heider had Adulting obligations at 11:00
There also quickly arose another problem. Two of our guests today happen to be State Cops, so if we didn't perform, there was a good.
chance I could be exposed as a fish fraud, which may include penalties up to and including jail time and text message harassment for an undisclosed period of time. Neither of these paths seemed all that great, so needless to say the pressure was on
We decided that with the cooler water from the North winds, we would fish the Pierheads. And about 15 minutes after our initial set, it became clear we did not make a poor decision. There was however one problem that became clear right away. And that was the size of the fish
You will always catch dinks this time of year, and we did, but the non dink salmonoids we caught were all a bunch of feisty 2 year old fish. These are going to be the fish returning to spawn in the Fall of 2028 and most of them are around 4-7 pounds
Believe it or not, these fish are some of the scrappiest little jerks you encounter out here. They are lean and hungry, and when they bite, they typically do not make life the easiest on the fishermen. Couple that observation with the fact that we had 13 rigger bites, meaning that these fish were at the back of the boat in no time, and life got a little chaotic for us at times
When all was said and done, we ended with 23 fish by 9:50 (releasing 3 dinks) that included 12 fish in that 4-8 pound range, 3 Kings that were right around 20", a 6 LB Lake Trout and 4 dinks that were simply going to be Cormorant Food if we turned them back
It was by all measurable standards a successful outing, and we all had a great time out on the water. If it wasn't for the gnats and the fact that we didn't have any big fish, it would have been a perfect day on the water! I give it a solid 4 and a half stars!!
