Fishing and the long dry Summer

I’m a little late on the game getting our fishing season wrap up written. My apologies as we’ve been fervently getting the duck boats, dekes and gear ready for our waterfowl season that started last weekend. 

Briefly– ample freshwater runoff from a long wet spring and little bait accumulation  dampened the fishing on our local reefs for the lingcod and halibut openers this past May. Luckily, conditions shaped up as the season progressed and we ended up taking some nice lingcod later in the month. Halibut remained slow locally, and with the extremely limited days wdfw has given us  to fish the flatties these past few years there wasn’t much of a chance to redeem it.  On a day “off ” Capt Dave and the LingHammer crew traveled West and tied into a beauty of an 80lb’r off Port Angeles, so the freezer didn’t go bare. 

Lake Anderson trout redeemed the early spring fishing and put out some beautiful, sizeable and scrappy rainbows before the warmup. The short Spot prawn season was another good one and  summer Dungeness crabbing in the Bays was excellent. Late summer saw some great bottomfishing on rock sole and even some big starry flounder in the mix as the crab pots soaked. The crew even got in some late night squid fishing. 

Anderson Lake rainbow

 rock sole

The summer weather was beautiful this year– Seattle set a new record logging 56 days of rain-less, warm sunny days ( unheard of ! ). A rare treat for us Pacific Northwesterners.  Fall is in the air now as I catch up on these blogs. The winds and rain have returned… Duck weather 🙂