Out from 8:00am until 12:30am today. Beauty sunny day with slight SE breeze making for a small chop. Only 13 boats visible to us out there, so quite the contrast to Sunday!!
Anyway first 90 minutes were great and we were kept busy. Retained our two unclipped in fairly short order and proceed to release another 7 or 8 unclipped. All on pink/UV hootchie and vintage McKnight spoon in 450-500’ of water off Secretary. No hatchery fish among them. Then we began getting pestered by little shakers and the coho went off the boil by 10am. All went quiet and we tried various depths to no avail.
Around 11:00am decided to take of the spoon and put a glo mint tulip hootchie on and dropped it to 90’ and got a hit before I had set the rod. Wouldn’t ya know it but yet another unclipped coho! So that makes two trips without encountering a single hatchery fish, although Sunday maybe doesn’t count as it was so slow we only boated two unclipped in 5 hours!!
Put the glo hootchie down again and got another hit right away. Very curious fight ensured with some strong pulling. Big surprise it was a pacific jack mackerel! Never caught one before. Got four more hits on that hootchie and boated two more mackerel. The bigger one (see pic) gave a surprisingly strong tugging fight.
We are going to try some mackerel recipes and maybe smoke one. Back in the U.K. people eat Atlantic mackerel all the time and I am sure these will taste even better than I remember those did. (We have filleted one already and it has a fairly dark reddish looking flesh which reminds me of tuna. No surprise there since tuna and mackerel are related.)
Very nice day all in all, even though hatchery coho are mysteriously uncatchable for us. LOL
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