Yeah, here are my buddies heading out for the afternoon with me beached. Oh well, that’s how it goes, sometimes. While I attended to shore-bound activities, they roamed the nearshore ocean, casting RIO Striper Intermediate and 26 ft sink tip fast sinking lines.
The fishfinder showed massive bait concentrations but Rockfish were difficult to locate.
Ocean water temperatures had soared recently from under 50 to nearly 60 degrees F, and the entire fishing playing field had shifted with the warm water. They did find a few Rockfish, Blacks and Blues, but fish were cagey and well dispersed, and as likely to be a foot under the surface as fifty feet down.
The ocean was glassy with no wind. Perfect conditions for making 70-90 ft casts with lightly weighted flies (unweighted flies too) and stripping on the retrieve.
Coho are around in nearshore waters, with a fishing season that is open a few days a week, and a regulation system that I am not about to try to interpret for this blog post. Suffice to say, one would be advised to fish barbless hooks, practice careful fish handling and release, and make sure that retention of a coho (be it hatchery or wild) is permitted on any given day when you are fishing the ocean or river.
Silvers will often respond well to a trolled bucktail fly, right in the prop wash, but it is also a ton of fun to find the occasional salmon casting and stripping flies in the open ocean. The next few photos capture memories of cast-and strip silvers in the open ocean, located under diving birds. Now I’m getting my days confused but whatever, it’s just a fishing report anyway, and it’s all close enough to be true on any given day.
Concentrate your casting around current rips, bird or bait activity, and (even better) actively surfacing feeding salmon. (see, I’d already said this ha ha!)
Then the fun starts when one dory gets stuck in the beach sand, then another and another and pretty soon it looks like rush hour traffic in Portland with everyone towing everyone else or at least trying.
Hope you get a chance to get out in the ocean and fly fish soon. I will be starting to shoot an extensive series of videos on saltwater flies this weekend, and look forward to sharing ideas, trials and techniques along with the pattern specifics.
Best to ya all.
Jay Nicholas
Great fly! Look forward to seeing the video.