yak2you2
2009-01-05 03:57:41
I've been waiting patiently, but I can stand it anymore, time to beg. I want to hear the story about you throwing all your herring and bait rigs over Eric, please, please, please!! Any other stories would be good too, tis the season!
Salty
2009-01-05 09:02:04
Throwing all my bait, bait hooks, rubber snubbers, nose clips, salt, and herring threaders overboard one day in July of 1981.
Here is the story.
I grew up trolling salmon with my parents on a 32 footer and learned to thread herring at a young age. I fished off the back deck nearly every time we anchored from the time I could stand up on my own. I nearly always used bait, usually herring, but sometimes salmon guts, and caught a variety of bottom fish including an occasional nice halibut. My very favorite activity in life was to accompany my father, "Skip", up trout streams and catch Cutthroat and Rainbow trout on salmon eggs. You could say I was "hooked" on fishing with bait.
When I started handtrolling in the mid 70's I mostly used rod and reel and either rolled whole herring or mooched plug cut herring for either Chinook or Coho. While I didn't get rich I made enough hand trolling to keep at it and buy a power troll permit and 40 foot wood troller in the winter of 1981.
I started power trolling in Ernest Sound, south of Wrangell, in May of 1981. I followed my mother and her husband, Bill George, around Onslow Island. They threaded herring and I did too. Salting the herring just right and getting them to follow the flasher just so was a big part of the deal. Somehow, between trying to keep the boat running, keeping the gear off the bottom, surviving the numerous times I hit my head on the boom, roof of the cabin door, or ceiling of the cabin while dashing from the pit to the wheelhouse to turn the autopilot off after it suddenly decided to go hard left (there was no cockpit steering wheel) I was not doing too well getting those darn herring to roll or not roll just so.
Catching about half of what mom and Bill were catching after regularly highlining them when I was handtrolling with rods was not too much fun either. It seemed like I would tie up to them in the evening and then spend half the night trying to fix something like the wash down pump and then Bill would be starting that 453 jimmy before I was rested. So, I was getting more and more tired and frustrated by the day.
I pulled the plug in mid-June and charged directly to Salisbury Sound north of Sitka and started fishing out of Kalinin Bay where Sitka Sound Seafoods had a buying scow. Somewhere along the line I picked up my wife and our two toddlers. I had two good friends who were power trolling out of Kalinin Bay and they patiently tried to teach me the drags off shore of Salisbury Sound. Unfortunately my wife got sick every time we went out past the Sound into the coastal swells.
But, there was this very nice protected drag called the Shark Hole right out of Kalinin Bay and in those years there were about eight power trollers and four to six handtrollers driving around in a circle there all day every day. Three or four of those guys were doing really well. Most of them used threaded herring and treble hooks. So, we started fishing there, and we caught a few but not nearly as many as most of the other power trollers.
Every day I took a nap and my wife steered around the drag for a couple of hours. Most of the other regulars, except for a couple of guys who everyone hated, chatted with each other on the CB radio. I always tuned into that channel in case anyone might slip up and divulge some useful information. A favorite topic among the regulars was commenting on the "correctness" of other trollers in the circle running of the drag. "Correctness" included everything from speed to distance from other boats.
It must be noted here that I was not the most popular guy with some of the long time power trollers to begin with because I had publicly represented Sitka handtrollers during the handtroll/powertroller allocation battles of the late 70's. I also was prone to leaking what others thought might be useful information on the radio. And neither my wife or I liked dragging around in a circle with a group of perfectionists. We were often the subject of the CB conversations about "correctness".
I was not too happy about the way the trolling was going that first June power trolling. My wife was seasick half the time, she didn't like trying to drive the boat in a circle and get yelled at by me or people on the radio. I didn't know a thing about bonding the boat, checking the line voltage, or eliminating prop and rudder noise.
Two of the guys on the drag were catching two to four times what the rest of us were. One of them used straight bait and the other used straight hootchies. I was running straight bait and it was not working. One day I woke up from my nap and asked my wife if we had any bites. She hated the steering anyway, but she really didn't like it when the guy in front of her caught 10 kings while I was napping and she didn't get one bite.
That day the guy in front of us in the circle was the guy fishing straight hootchies. I went out and ran the gear. After a couple of hours the herring that were left on the hooks didn't look like anything would want them anyway and there was the usual amount of bass, a ling or two, and a couple of shakers. Maybe it was the post nap crabbiness, maybe it was the total frustration of realizing I needed to know more to make it work, or maybe it was just orneriness. Whatever the reason was I remember taking all of my herring hooks, and all of my herring and throwing them overboard.
I announced to my wife;
"If I can't figure out how to catch these kings on hootchies then we aren't going to make it because herring will no longer cross my deck in pursuit of salmon."
I think those were my exact words. I know I repeated that line to my partners and others many times over the next 20 years. I nearly came to blows with my mother a couple of times because she would try and string up herring that we snagged on the gear or the salmon spit up. I didn't fish herring commercial trolling for the next 20 years.
It was tough at first and I regularly got highlined by my partners and others fishing bait but then, in 1982 I started to make a combination of # 5 superiors, 5 inch tomic plugs, and hootchies work for me. I had bonded the boat in the winter of 81-82 and replaced the shaft and bearings. The magic started to come. At first I started to keep up, then I started to produce more pretty consistently than my mentors using bait. Then there were those heady days in 1982 when I had the right hootchie, the right plug color, and my king scores soared to the unbelievable 40 and 50 in a day while others were still scratching for 10-15.
The headiness didn't last as I started communicating with fishermen who were very good hootchie fishermen and also knew how and when to do better with bait. I remember catching 10-15 per day on hootchies and spoons in April and May while others were stacking up 50-55 a day on herring. So, about seven years ago, I invested in treble hooks, threaders, nose clips, herring pails, salt and a bunch of hotspot flashers. I called a good friend who is one of the best herring threaders in the troll fleet and asked him to tell me exactly how to fish herring. He went and measured his tail leader length while I was talking to him and I was on the way.
I can't say I have fully mastered fishing herring but I will share this story. I was doing so well fishing herring in the winter and spring about four years ago that I decided to be prepared with a case salted up for the July 1 opening. I hadn't used any the first day but we got called into an area where one of my partners had caught 136 kings the first day on hootchies. Only a few other boats around and an area I was familiar with, but the fish weren't biting hootchies in the morning. We threaded some herring and they started coming. I told my partner and another old friend who happened to be in the area what they were coming on.
We switched to straight flashers and herring on each line. My wife threaded herring steadily and cleaned fish. My son Kris worked the gear, cleaned fish, and slush iced the fish. I ran gear and spent a lot of time in the wheelhouse staying on the fish. When we hit the school the kings would clatter all four lines with four or five a line. There were so few boats that we had the area to ourselves and could work the fish instead of making a drag.
My partner who called me in, who doesn't fish bait, ended up with 13. The other friend in the area had 17. I told my partner and friend what we were getting them on, the depth, what we were doing as best I could, but they never asked and I didn't tell my exact count. Discretion is sometimes the better part of valor so I won't do it here either other than to say it was the second best king day I ever had. (If you really want to know the exact number for some perverse reason send me a private e-mail and I will share it.) I am certain it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had the bait.
That is the story. I am sure I would never have become the mildly successful power troller that I did without choosing to figure out how to catch salmon without bait for 20 years. In addition to figuring out how to make artificial lures work for kings it helped lead to figuring out (with several other people) how to make bugs work for chums and coho. I am just as confident that using bait the last 7 years has helped my production a great deal.
yak2you2
2009-01-05 11:48:12
Cool story.Thanks for telling it, I think we all can relate to the frustration of not having the right stuff on, especially when someone else does, I know I've sure had plenty of frustrating days. The absolute most frustrating for me is catching them one day like crazy on a certain set up, then having them totally turn off on it the next day, and you know there still there but can't figure out what they want.