Boy, was I glad to get back to work last Monday so I could get some rest. Two guys from work and I went to the Tofino area last weekend. Actually, we took Thursday and Friday off and traveled on Thursday and Sunday. It rained and blew like hell Thursday night but Friday dawned mostly clear and darn near calm.
Friday we fished out of Uclulelet with well known guide Matt Guiguet, pronounced Gegey. Ain't the French weird? They seem to put letters in words so as to make them prettier. The ocean was kinda lumpy but we probably brought thirty chinooks to the boat and kept the eight largest that ran from twelve to sixteen pounds.
On Saturday Guiguet handed us off to a different guide out of Tofino due to an overbooking problem that he failed to mention until we were cleaning fish while idling in the bay Friday. We were nonplused by this development but the young man, one Derek Fraser, was a kick in the butt after the somewhat dour and slightly seasick Guiguet. Maybe half as many fish To the boat on Saturday but the quality was much better. Smallest kept was sixteen and the largest brought to the net (by me!) was twenty-four.
Interesting fishing! Both boats were twenty-plus Grady White's with big honking Yamaha four stroke outboards. Derek had two one-fifties and Matt ran a shiny new two-twenty-five. The boats were comfortable and solid but I'll bet you a buck my old Glas Ply would have ridden better in the chop Friday.
These guys use Scotty downriggers, bus ass hot spot flashers, and tiny sparkle hoochies or three inch coyote spoons. All fished within ten feet of the bottom on nine to eleven foot soft action Lamiglas rods equipped with single action Shimano Moocher reels loaded with enough monofilament to foul a good sized river all by themselves. The upshot is that slugging it out with a twenty pound chinook on such gear is a big time kick in the sitter.
We also took one twenty pound halibut on a day-glow white hoochie in this manner but we didn't actually fish for halibut in my opinion. Next year I'll insist on doing the halibut thing correctly because I wanted those big delicious weird looking devils. If we had shut down, drifted with the current, and bounced bait on the bottom I have little doubt that we would have had our halibut in short order. We hooked and lost three others as is was, for crissakes.
But we raised hell with the salmon and the area is just beautiful. Reminded me a lot of S.E. Alaska with bald eagles all over the place, whales, beautiful rock-bound coast, and like that.
Oh, yeah, we had a sea lion incident at the float at the end of the first day. There's this big bull that hangs out around the docks in Ucluelet and follows the charters while they are cleaning fish. He also followed us in. We had unloaded our stuff, fish included, and taken some pictures while the critter hung around, hoping we'd throw it some scraps, or so I thought. Phil and Leon were standing on either side of the fish bags when the big brute started to haul out right between them. I was still standing in the boat facing them and the sea lion so I gave him my very best shout from about six feet away. I can stop a Brittany doing thirty miles an hour when I really let go. Phil and Leon went ten feet in either direction and the animal looked like he wished he were somewhere else, I know I did. He finally decided that discretion was the better part of fish stealing. These are big animals so we grabbed our stuff and got the hell off the dock.
All in all a great weekend that I will repeat yearly from now until end-of-game.
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