October 27th column

[Pete Heley]

With the closing of the Siletz and Coos rivers to the retention of wild or nonclipped cohos as of last Saturday morning, the only coastal stream that allows the retention of wild cohos, as this is being written Sunday evening, is the Nehalem and it’s unclipped coho season may be closed by the time you read this. However, there is some river fishing for unclipped cohos available on the Siltcoos River between the Highway 101 Bridge and Siltcoos Lake.

While it is going to take some major rainfall to get coho salmon into Tahkenitch and Tenmile lakes, Siltcoos has been producing cohos for at least two weeks.

While the pressure from boat anglers trolling the lower Umpqua River is slowly decreasing, it seems that many of the shore anglers are starting to switch from casting spinners to fishing sand shrimp, salmon roe, or both beneath bobbers. Most of the bait fishing for salmon is taking place near the mouth of Winchester Creek in Winchester Bay’s East Boat Basin. Usually, there is a brief flurry of bites right at daybreak and then fishing slows down, but a bite can happen at any time. Bank anglers casting spinners are still getting some fish from Half Moon Bay, Osprey Point, near the Gardiner Boat Ramp and at various spots around the East Boat Basin, but more than half their catch consists of illegal-to-keep wild cohos. Several people reported a jumbo chinook weighing more than 40 pounds was landed by a bank angler late last week who was casting spinners at Osprey Point.

Although no cohos are legal to keep in Smith River, it seems that fair numbers of chinooks have been taken over the last few weeks on spinners or sand shrimp fished beneath bobbers.

It will probably take a major rainstorm to jumpstart the chinook salmon fishing on the Elk and Sixes riversbut when it happens, expect some sensational chinook salmon angling.

Bottomfishing pressure out of Winchester Bay has increased over the last couple of weeks and some very large lingcod have been caught recently. Last Saturday, Marc Barum of Florecne, fishing with his brother-in-law Kevin Ladd of Reedsport, landed a 35 pound lingcod that was actually weighed (most are not actually weighed and estimates tend to run high). They also accounted for two other lings that topped 20 pounds. While lingcod that big are rare, the number of fish weighing between ten and 15 pounds is very impressive and well worth the effort it takes to reach them.

While the average yellow perch taken at Tenmile Lakes is quite small, a number of perch measuring more than 12-inches have been taken over the last couple of weeks. Good to excellent perch fishing should be available in most of our local waters and decent largemouth bass angling should be available during nice afternoons for a few more weeks. Smallmouth bass fishing on the Umpqua, while falling well short of summetime numbers, offers anglers a chance at some larger bass in the late afternoons.

Small tiger trout were slated to be dumped into Jackson County’s Fish Lake. These brook trout-brown trout hybrids tend to be rather aggressive and feed well on smaller fish - which is hopefully very bad news for Fish Lake’s overly abundant chub population. The fish, which grow rather fast, are usually relatively easy to catch, but, at least for a while, these fish will not be legal to keep. Tiger trout have reached weights of at least 20 pounds in the Great Lakes and the Washington state record from “its” Fish Lake near Leavenworth is over 13 pounds. These trout should reduce Fish Lake’s chub population and increase angling interest in the lake. However, I am slightly troubled by the ODFW’s aversion to using brown trout to achieve the same result. In Diamond Lake, which has over the years actually had a very few brown trout reach the lake from it’s Lake Creek outlet, the ODFW planted spring chinook which showed almost no interest in eating the tui chubs and Williamson River rainbows, which ate the chubs like crazy, but proved easy, possibly too easy, to catch. As for Fish Lake, it once had brown trout in it, but the owner of Fish Lake Resort stated that he had not seen a brown in the lake since around 2003. But on a wall in Fish Lake Resort there is a mount of a brown trout taken from the lake a number of years ago that weighed more than 18 pounds. Since any spawning in Fish Lake would be pretty much confined to the seepage entering the upper end of the lake, the chances of brown trout, or any other trout species, overrunning the lake would most unlikely. At any rate, the addition of tiger trout to Oregon should be of major benefit and hopefully it will not be long before anglers are allowed to keep the ones they catch.

Anglers wanting to fish Diamond Lake need to be aware that the daily trout limit drops from eight fish per day down to five trout per day for the last four days of this season (Oct. 28th through Oct. 31st.). However, it will reopen next April with an eight trout daily limit. I would love to know the reasoning behind this - so if anyone can help me out, please do.

Fishing for northern pike in eastern Washington’s Pend Oreille River continues to be very good, but one pike angler was quite surprised last week when he hauled in a six pound lake trout which somehow managed to get past Alberni Dam on Lake Pend Oreille. The river has produced pike weighing more than 30 in the last couple of years, but the increasing numbers of three to six pound fish has got biologists worried about the pike population’s future impact on the Pend Oreille’s gamefish species. Currrently, the pike seem to be feeding primarily on nongamefish species.