With the closures of Puget Sound rivers, I decided to try something else for a change of pace. I packed up the surfcaster and headed for the Columbia to go sturgeon fishing.

My son and I ended up at Prescott right next to the old Trojan nuke plant. We fished for about five hours, but we had no bites other than the three seals who seemed to be gorging themselves on smelt.

The weather was gorgeous, though. Any other sturgeon anglers on this board?

Try the mouth of the Cow or Kalama. Heard a good report from there today.

So how's the smelting? Has it picked up?

i too was at prescott.....from daylight to 11am....caught 8 shakers and missed 10....very light biters...caught a couple with smelt in their mouths...seals and shakers were definetly gouging themselves on the smelt....

My brother in-law Kelley and myself fished just upstream from the mouth of the Willamette Sunday. We crept through about 5 miles of fog to get there, we made it to the area in front of the port cranes at 9:30.

What I witnessed by 2 boats in the hogline was surreal. These 2 boats had a fish on every 5 minutes all morning. I'm talking non-stop action by 3 people on one boat and 2 on the other. As fast as they could rig 'em and get 'em back out. The boats to the left and right of these 2 had results similar to ours, spotty to none. I saw a couple of guide boats get a few too. The huge majority were small ones and released. I only saw 1 kept in the 25 or so boats I could see.

I managed to hook up a barlely sub-legal at 12:30. We had moved to deeper water, 75' for that one. That was fun, it was just big enough to pull some line out. Took a couple of minutes to reel in. He jetted when we released him, that was cool.