Coho Know How 2011 1

Last season was nothing short of a silver bust in local waters but hot on the heels of a pink salmon run is a very solid showing of chunky coho salmon!

With the Everett Coho Derby looming in a little more than a week, let's brush up on some silver slaying strategies!

Robbie Tobeck gets in a stance to bonk this double on silvers! 

One look at the forecasts for Puget Sound coho should make you forget all about the end of summer with over 105,000 headed for the Skagit, 31,000 Stillaguamish silvers, the Snohomish chipping in with 124,000 and the mid & south Sound totaling over 200,000 more! That's over 450,000 reasons to get fired up for fall fishing and the upcoming culmination of the Northwest Salmon Derby Series, The Everett Coho Derby.

 Tobeck hoists two chunky coho that would have been a dandy derby day catch! 

In order to get off to a fast fall start on coho, let's talk technique & tackle. I tend to view saltwater coho angling in light of chinook techniques. After all, we spend winter, spring and summer targeting chinook and only get a crack at coho in the fall so it's useful to consider chinook techniques as a "baseline".

Coho are nothing short of metabolic machines and as such, tend to be interested in smaller offerings trolled faster and shallower than their chinook counterparts. We've spent a good part of the summer keeping our gear close to the bottom while running familiar bottom contours. No more! Silvers seemingly avoid structure and have an affinity for the shipping lanes out in the middle of the sound.

Quick, morning limits are often the case when the silvers come streaming in!  

So where do we start our search for silvers?

By looking for Surface activity: Bait jumping, birds working or my personal favorite: tide rips. Generally there is a "dirty side" and a "clean side" of a Puget Sound rip. While trolling, try not to cross the rip and stay on the clean side to minimize gear fouling but don't feel like you have to "rub" the rip. In other words, if you can clearly see the rip, you're close enough!

Kevin Gogan and his daughter Hannah were "close enough" to a tide rip for this limit of silvers! 

To place numbers on the other concepts, start fishing at first light with a cut plug herring six feet behind a blaze orange trolling "kidney" or mooching sinker fished twenty "strips" deep (a two-foot pull of line off of your reel is known as a strip) and run a downrigger 40 feet deep. Keep your speeds in the 2.5 to 3.5 mph speed range which should result in a 45 degree downrigger wire angle assuming you're using 12 pound Cannonballs. As the light level increases throughout the day, increase your depths and when you hook up, enter a waypoint into your plotter so you can troll back into the school. Silvers tend to mill around and when you find one, there is sure to be more!

Fairly new to the salmon scene is Brad's Super Bait cut plug. Just open this plug up and fill with oil packed tuna and you're good to go! 

Silver Horde's "Coho Killer" have been a winning piece of gear for not only coho but chinook as well! Run these 36 to 40 inches behind a Jim's Breakaway Flasher by QCove and you're in business! 

Get out there this late summer and enjoy some of the fastest, wildest salmon fishing of the year! Heck, summer isn't really over…is it????

Tom Nelson
The Outdoor Line
710 ESPN Seattle
www.theoutdoorline.com