Available Fishing Guide:
Website: Darrell & Dads Family Guide Service
I fished the Nisqually for my first time from about 6 to 7:30 pm. I was off the bank a little upstream from the big cement fishing bulkhead. It was very crowded, but not quite to the point of combat fishing (well, unless you were in one of a couple prime locations), but everybody was pretty friendly.
I didn't hook into any salmon, but I was fighting one about after ten minutes of being there. Be forewarned, this is one of those mildly interesting fish stories that I'll probably tell my grandkids over and over again someday. A guy lost what looked to be a really nice king about 200 yards upstream from me (it got in the heavy current and there was nothing he could do with it). At the time I was casting a pink mepps agila because I’d already lost a couple of corky set-ups, when I accidentally let my line drift too far downstream and get tangled in another angler’s line. I looked over at my angling cohorts and after about a minute of trying to figure out whose line I was tangled with it turned out it was just some old snagged up line. So I reeled my lure up to my rod tip; it was entangled in the other line, and began pulling in the surprising mobile snag line with my bare hands. After about five seconds of this the line began to peel out of my hands (leaving one of those nice deep line slices on my pointer finger of my left hand). The line I had tangled into was indeed the broken-off line from the king lost a few minutes before. Another angler got me a stick to wrap the line around so it didn’t destroy my hands, and I fought it for four or five minutes before it managed to spit the hook. It jumped twice; it was a beautiful fish, twenty pound range. It would have been released since it didn’t willfully take my lure, but it would have been a really nice photo-op, ha ha. I did get the whole rig that the salmon bit on. It was a standard corky set-up with a really really small green/blue corky, with a small (for salmon) hook, and no yarn.
In anycase, the fishing is still pretty good in the combat zones on the river. I’d say a fish was caught about every twenty minutes (of course there are about ten anglers at these areas though), and a fish was hooked about every ten or fifteen minutes. I’d recommend trying to make it down during the weekday if you can, it’s got to be a zoo during the weekend.
Available Fishing Guide:
Website: Darrell & Dads Family Guide Service