Chances are getting better for hooking up with king salmon
On Puget Sound they're called king salmon, and not just because they can grow so large their eyes seem as big as hubcaps and their tails as large as mud flaps.
Everything about a mature chinook salmon suggests primal ferocity and dominance, from the way they savagely attack the smaller fish they eat, to the fierce look of their black gum line and streamlined heads, to the way they take off when hooked like a runaway Sounder train.
Being connected by a fishing rod and line to a king salmon -- whether it's 12 pounds or 45 -- feels something like hanging on to a live wire of evolution.
And for many of us, following the tides and currents while fishing for kings, with Rainier and other peaks on the horizon and eagles and seagulls overhead, is an essential Puget Sound experience.
"For me, personally, chinook epitomize Puget Sound and the Northwest," says Keith Robbins, the last salmon fishing guide on the Sound who still practices the time-honored technique known as mooching, using only a lead weight and baited hooks on the line. "I cherish them and respect them a lot, and I don't want to see them disappear."
Oncorhynchus tshawytscha is the largest of the five Pacific salmon species, in Puget Sound averaging 12 to 15 pounds at maturity but growing much larger. The state record for a sport-caught chinook is 70.5 pounds, a giant taken in 1964 in the Strait of Juan de Fuca off Sekiu. The world-record sport-caught chinook was a 97-pound, 4-ounce monster taken in 1984 in Alaska's Kenai River.
Prized by fishermen for their fight and taste, these great beasts return from the ocean to Puget Sound every summer, as they have for millennia. And anglers now have a better opportunity to fish for and keep them than in many years past.
However, all chinook are not the same anymore. In the modern era of salmon fishing and declining salmon runs, there are wild chinook and there are hatchery chinook, and on most of the inland waters of Washington, recreational fishermen may keep only the latter.
These are chinook spawned at federal, state and tribal hatcheries, raised anywhere from a few months to a year, then released to head out to sea. More than 30 million are released every year into Puget Sound and its streams, and more than 90 percent of them are first marked by having their adipose fins clipped off.
Wild chinook, of course, are those that spawn naturally in the rivers and streams, and those from rivers and streams that flow into Puget Sound and associated waters are listed by the federal government as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Hatchery chinook are marked so anglers can tell them from protected wild chinook, in what the state calls "selective fisheries." The state is seeking to expand selective fisheries as a way to allow anglers to catch and keep abundant hatchery chinook while releasing protected wild chinook.
For example, this year anglers are catching and keeping hatchery kings in traditional areas of the central and north Sound that have been closed to all king retention for 15 years, including storied salmon spots such as Jefferson Head, Point No Point, Possession Bar, Bush Point and Point Wilson. Catch areas 9 and 10, basically from Vashon Island north to Port Townsend, will close when the state estimates anglers have kept 7,000 hatchery chinook.
Another selective king fishery is in its fifth year along the Strait of Juan de Fuca off Sekiu and Port Angeles (catch areas 5 and 6), and the catch ceiling for that fishery was boosted this year to 4,000 marked chinook.
"I'm really excited that we're starting to see some selective fisheries for chinook and getting people back on the water," says Curt Kraemer of Marysville, a retired state fish biologist and lifelong salmon angler. "I think it's important that people get a chance to fish for chinook, because making a connection with those fish, you make a connection with what they need to survive. People become advocates for that natural resource."
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Chances are getting better for hooking up with king salmon
