Have not fished for about a week and went out late and had a rather slow day for Chinook going one for 3 and that was a little 12lb white, not clipped.
I am sure that many of you are aware of the Sooke River Chinook Protection Zone that goes into effect on Aug. 1'st each year,, although it is obvious that some are not. The boundry goes across the mouth of Sooke Inlet from the white square/diamond marker (depending on how you look at it) on the rocks at Possession Point over to Muir Point at the far end of the Sooke Bluffs. On the east end where it is very easy to tell precisely where that line is, some of us like to fish in towards the line and then turn to run along close in on the outside of the line.
So late afternoon/early evening we were doing that, going slow, when we hooked up a very heavy hard pounding Chinook down 37 feet about 40 feet outside the Chinook non retention zone but heading towards the zone. It proceeds to fast charge the boat and normally I would go straight and even add a little boat speed if necessary to let the guy with the rod catch up to it on the initial charge. I only had a couple of seconds to think about it, and decided to make the normal 90 degree turn to keep us outside the Chinook non retention zone while yelling to reel like hell since when you have a large Chinook (guesstimated well into the 20's) , doing a boat charge on its first run, the last thing you want to do is make it harder for the angler to catch up to it by turning into the fish. He did catch up to it when the flasher popped the surface only about 20 feet behind the boat with a completely pissed off and very fresh large Chinook who then throws the hook.
This had me second guessing myself as to if I should have just kept going straight which may have kept that big Chinook (for Sooke), on the line, but would have crossed us into the non retention zone. I played it safe to be sure we complied with the regs. which may have contributed to losing that fish. Clearly we hooked it up in it in a legal area, but does that count as catching it, if it takes you over a boundary into a non retention zone? I have also caught enough big ones over the years to know that sometimes the really big ones will take you where they want to go, before you are able to wear them down and get them under control and up to the boat.
