Ed Iman’s Fish Camp 2011 was winding down for Aaron and me with a two day salmon-fest at the mouth of the White Salmon River on the Columbia River. This location can consistently put out lots of salmon and some monsters, as we can attest to. Last year a Fish Camp participant boated a 45 pound king!

On Wednesday we fished 5 in the boat with retired guide Herb Good. Herb is an expert in the art of “hover fishing” which is a method of basically slipping your boat downstream and “hovering” over pods of fish found on the fish finder. He uses exclusively eggs on a three foot leader, with a 1 oz cannonball weight. Drop the bait to the bottom and crank up two full rotations. Then, watch and wait for the bite. There are a lot of pesty “peamouths” (basically a sucker) that will nip nip at your bait, and you have to separate those from the more aggressive take down of a salmon. Sometimes it’s obviously, sometimes not so much. The skill of the boat handler really comes in to play as he adjusts the drift when a group of fish is found. Doubles, and in our case today, triples, are possible. Also, the right bait properly cured makes a huge difference. Herb uses only freshly harvested eggs and Pautzke Balls O Fire Fire Cure for his eggs. The eggs looked great and were deadly effective.

We started fishing at 7:15am and within minutes Aaron had hooked into the first salmon, a solid 15 pound buck. The fishing continued that way until we called it a day at 1pm. We had two distinct “hot bites” from 7-9am and again from 11:30 to 1pm. The final tally for fish was 5 jacks, 5 fish in the 12-15 pound class, and two hogs of 26 and 27 pounds, all males except one. Aaron had an amazing day, hooking I believe around 6 fish. I hooked one (kinda sucked!) but even so, a wonderful day. Herb also treated us to a delicious lunch on the boat.

On Thursday we went out with Steve Leonard of Steves Guided Adventures. Steve has been guiding for over twenty years and is an excellent, knowledgeable guide. We started a bit later, 8ish, and began with the same hover fishing eggs technique. Once again Aaron had the hot rod, quickly boating a bright 15 pound buck. A few more passes confirmed that for whatever reason, today was not going to be a repeat of yesterday. The peamouths were merciless and the wind started kicking up out of the west, making it harder to control the drift. A good guide always has a Plan “B”, and Steve was no exception, switching us all over to bait wrapped kwik fish in chartreuse colors. He runs the kwikfish with a 4 foot leader and 3 oz cannonball, two cranks up from the bottom.On our first pass we bonked a nice jack, right in front of the river mouth. A couple more passes and the wind was really starting to rough up the water. I chanted under my breath my favorite fish matra “come on fish, hit it” when BAMM! my rod doubled over and I was into a solid fish. Again, this was right in front of the mouth of the White Salmon, close to the east white buoy marker. The fish put up a great fight with several strong runs, but ended up being scooped up and added to our day’s totals. It was a very nice 17 pound king salmon.

By this point we had ugly white waves breaking over our stern, so Steve took us back to the boat launch. Along the way we were entertained by para-sailers skimming along at incredible speeds, catching air 20-30 feet high, doing 360s and generally just having a blast on the rough and windy Columbia River. If you get a chance to fish with Steve go for it, I learned a lot and he got us on fish on a day when we saw few others catch fish.

Two great days of salmon fishing, and Aaron and I have a ton of fish to process. If you get a chance head down to the Columbia, it’s pretty darn hot fishing!

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