Got back today from caping on Vancouver Is. Fished a few lakes in my float tube and caught a few beautiful rainbows on my fly rod. Then came the day I had been waiting for months. We were going out with a guide out of Ucluelet. After reading reports here and other stories about the place I expected silver action like Sekiu and many large kings to go around. I gusse it is always like that there, except the day we were there. The night before our guide caught 3 large kings and a silver in 1 hour by the lighthouse and was hopeing for that to happen again.

In the fog we headed out with all the other boats. We started marking fish right away and saw bait breaking the surface. We trolled at for a couple hours changing spoons, plugs, hoochies, and flies on my fly rod. All we came up with was a 10 inch coho on my fly which was nothing to my 8wt rod.

So we then ran off shore to some banks. After another 2 hours we caugt a shaker chinook. Our guide started to get a little shaky and started looking around for a banana on the boat (I made sure we didn't bring any).

Now, still no fish, we went to a place north of town along the shore. Her we finally found some biting fish, but few of them and long inbetween. We brought 2 wild coho to the boat and released them, LDR'd 1 fish, and caught 1 hatchery coho about 8 pounds. Our guide even stayed out for an extra hour trying to get us into some fish. He tried everything he had on the boat to try to get them to bite. We found out by talking to other people at the marina that it was very slow all around except for a few of the long running boats. Some people said that it was the slowest of the year. We only saw 1 chinook at the marina about 18 pounds.

I was hoping to hook into my first saltwater chinook and hopefully my first tyee. For thouse of you that do good there what were you doing that we didn't?

After the slow day on the ocean, we still had fun (it's fishing not catching), we headed to the Oyster River south of Cambell River. At the mouth I was aot to find some spooky pinks, these fish too weren't biting mine or anybodies flies. Possibly due to the seal that kept coming into the mouth which is only 3-5 feet deep. :rolleyes: Or the couple guys using buzzbombs in the shallow water on stacked fish. They caught a few tail first, imagine that?

After that we went to the Cambell River. There were lots of pinks throught the system and I was able to land 3 pinks on my fly rod.

In all it was a fun trip even though Ucluelet could have been better. I did manage to "smuggle" some seal fur for fly tying though!

Fishingjunky,
Sorry to hear you fished Ucluelet on a slow day. Sounds like your guide worked hard to get you a fish. Unfortuneately some days are like that....either the fish move or my guess is they had gorged the day before and just weren't biting again yet. We found lots anchovies in our fish that were 9-10 in long. Wouldn't take many of these to fill a fish up for a day or so. Next day fishing was probably good again. We had one slow day out of the 6 that we fished. Only other comment is that our best success was at big bank ("longest running boats") which is over 20 miles out. Most of the Island West guides and the large Princess charter boats were out there.