Hey Guys,
Well, here's the story of Chinook Salmon fishing during late July to early August 2002. We drove 12 hours to Terrace, BC to fish for the fabled spawning chinooks. We had just received a shipment of Spinnex spoons and we wanted to test them. We rode the boat for about half an hour until we came to a spot with deep, fast water and a calmer area close to the shore. My father was casting upstream and bouncing our spoons on the river bottom, letting the current take the lure. This is to simulate a small trout eating the eggs.
We fished for about 2 hours when a my dad hooked one. It was so strong that it burned his thumb when it took off and he tried to slow it down. The fish was on for about 30 seconds until it straightened the rings on the spoon. My father was displeased with this so he promptly changed the rings to a much larger size. We fished a little bit more and my father hooked another one. This time he held it in one spot until we had enough time to jump in the boat. We chased the fish for about 45 minutes, and finally landed our first Chinook. We took it to a local tackle shop and weighed it in at 46 lbs.
After this we tried other methods of fishing, like the spin-n-glo. I hooked one but he snapped the line very quickly. At this point, it was August 2nd. The fishing slowed down for a few days, with not much action for us or most of the other boats, except one guy. There was a guy from Calgary who was having decent success with a hot pink Luhr Jensen Hot Shot. On August 6th, we went to the tackle shop and bought a couple, just to try them out. The next morning we went out on the river at 8:00, backtrolling down it for about 3 and a half hours. We stopped on the shore because my 8 year old brother was getting hungry.
I lit a fire and cooked hot dogs while my father began casting with his trusty Spinnex spoon. After about 6 casts a fish hit. He handed me the rod and we piled into the boat to chase the fish. The fish circled the boat over and over again, constantly running downstream and trying to go under the boat. He would be on one side of the boat, and then decide to go to the other side, trying to take some line and part of the rod with him.
We came to one point in the river where it split into two channels, a shallow one and a deep one. Knowing that the prop would get torn up in the shallow water, my father accelerated away from the channel. Unfortunately, the fish thought otherwise. He took off down stream, thankfully into deep water,causing my reel to scream like a drag racer's tires. At this point, about an hour had gone by from the time that my dad hooked the fish, and i was getting tired, and so was the fish.
I could now control him a little more, and I finally got a good look at him. He looked maybe a little bigger than the previous fish my father had caught. As I pulled the fish up to the side of the boat,my father brought out the net and tried to get him. As soon as the fish saw the net, though, it freaked, going straight to the bottom. I managed to pull him up about five minutes later, and my dad got him into the net. He tried to simply pull it up, but it was too heavy, and then I knew it was big.
When we got it into the boat we went to shore to take pictures. Exhausted after that long fight with the salmon, I struggled to pull the fish out of the boat and onto shore. We took pictures of it, and estimated it to weigh about 60 lbs. After an hour riding the boat back upstream, we went back to the tackle shop to weigh it. I was amazed when I read the scale - 67 lbs!
Everyone, even the locals, said it was huge.
Note from Fish-Hawk - even the Ontario locals will say that it is a huge fish. I thought it was a seal
