This was an awesome last minute birthday trip. We left at sunrise and got into our first bites within 20 minutes. The coho were on fire and practically chasing the boat! It's too bad the seals and sea lions were too. The action was fast with 19 fish on and three kept before everyone got tired and ready to head back to the dock for some lunch. This was a great trip and I hope to see these guys again!

The Chinook Season closed below Puget Island on August 6th, but the A and B runs of Coho are coming into the river and the crab are filling out quickly. My dad and I went out for a bit of a test run on crab as well as some exploratory coho fishing in a few "non-traditional" spots. We not only got into the Coho but the crab came in nice, with 17 on our first run of the pots mid way through the tides. We did have to release one small Chinook, but that was a fine price to pay for a fun day on the water!

We left at 6:30 in the morning with the mission to get Levi on his first salmon ever. After a little bit of a slow start the rods started dropping and the line started spooling. The first one was a beautiful hatchery Chinook that made me cry when we had to release it. Our spirits soon went up when we hooked into a nice 18lb upriver bright chinook that we could keep. Levi managed to get the fish to the boat and we had high fives all around when we saw it was hatchery! A few lost fish later we found ourselves in Coho city with more takedowns than we could count. After a set of back to back double hookups we had 3 more keepers in the boat and were working on my limit. The fish didn't want to let us catch our breath and soon reminded us what Buoy 10 is supposed to be about. We were limited by 12:30 and on our way back to the dock. This was "Good Old Days" style non-stop action. We set out to get Levi on one special fish and somehow he managed to reel in a whole boat limit and then some with the released wild fish. I can't wait to go fishing with these guys again!