Had a great trip to Tofino Aug 9-12. Didn’t start great but we finished up in pretty good shape. Thank you to everyone who has posted reports. As promised, here are some details from our trip that hopefully others can use…
Friday evening – rolled into Tofino, launched and we were able to head out by 4 pm. Went straight to Portland Point (the Kidney) and worked it, with no fish. Not an unusual start to our trips, but not very encouraging.
Saturday - woke up to a breeze in Tofino, so as we headed out, we were already thinking about contingency plans. We got just past the lighthouse and with the wind and waves, it was like a washing machine. We probably could have gotten out, but it was clear that fishing would have been miserable. We tried around Wilf Rock, but the water and wind was just as unfriendly. We were thinking about Ahous Bay, but stopped in Calmus Passage instead. It was calm and we marked a lot of fish, but didn’t hit anything. We headed to Rafael and worked it for a few hours – it was pretty tough with the wind and not that productive. We came back to Tofino mid afternoon for a little break and headed back out to Chicken Ranch. We ended the day with only 1 small spring, 1 small hatchery coho, one small ling and one 20 lb halibut. Saturday night we were depressed, but that’s why we schedule a 3 ½ day trip hoping for 2 days worth of limits.
Sunday – we went straight to Starfish. We really had the place to ourselves and the water was as flat as the previous day had been lumpy. One guy on our boat immediately hit a very nice spring that we got just out of reach of the net for quite a while where we could see how poorly he was hooked and then watch him swim away. The same guy hooked up pretty quickly again and played a nice fish fairly easily to the boat with only one unsuccessful stab with the net before we had him on board… we had to weigh him a couple times to confirm the number… 37 lbs! A real snubbed nose pure white hog! Our trip was looking up! We banged out a couple more in the high teens before things died down. So with all the radio chatter about Southwest Corner (and beyond), we decided to head over to the Fried Egg and take a look. No immediate action and when the fog lifted a little we saw the first grouping of boats to the Corner proper so we moved over and started hitting one native coho after another – beautiful fish, but not very helpful to our fish box. We saw people boat a few fish so they must have had some much better way of attracting hatchery fish. We didn’t last long before we headed back over to Starfish and with steady effort ended the day with 9 spring, 5 humpies, and 3 hatchery silvers. No more springs over 20, but several in the high teens.
Monday – of course it was straight back to Starfish to stick it out for the day. The conditions continued to be so beautiful it was surreal – glassy smooth water with fog in all directions – just a milky white glow all around. Made it to 7 springs including a handful in the low 20’s and one 25. Plenty of good sized humpies so we kept 10 for smoking, and only 2 hatchery coho. The guy who caught the 37 lber thought he had an even bigger screamer that then nestled down in the water column… ended up being a 45 lb hali caught in 185’ of water trolling a hoochie at 100’ on the downrigger. We don’t fish much for hali so got to use the harpoon because we weren’t ready to gaff him onto a medium sized deck crammed with five guys.
I saved the notes about gear and depths til the end because it was very consistent. Almost everything was caught on a flasher with a white hoochie with a red eye or a green spatterback. Almost everything was caught between 90-120’ on the downrigger. As in previous years, our best tip is moving the downrigger up or down 10-15’ every couple minutes which can really trigger a strike. We caught pinks down to 150’ and native coho at every level and they hit big plugs and spoons, so we don’t have any advice for keeping them off. We fished both anchovy and herring plus turds, but didn’t catch a single spring with them. One more unusual observation… as opposed to previous years seeing 7” pilchards in the springs, we saw lots of 3/4” to 1” tiny bait fish of some kind (curious what they were) so our last morning I popped on a coho killer (green and white with a red/orange dot) and sent it right down to the bottom and pretty quickly picked up a nice 20# spring plus one more before we switched back to our most consistent hoochies.
We plan to post a detailed report next year about this time (so we hope others continue to share a little intelligence as well). Always willing to trade PMs for more specific info if it’s helpful Good luck everybody. As soon as I sort through pictures I’ll post – the 37 doesn’t look that huge in the pictures – don’t know if it’s true but we heard that the guys who process our fish took a couple of pics because of the size (and shape) of our big one.
