Went again this year for the 43rd Annual Port Alberni Salmon Festival with friends in British Columbia. This is my 3rd year fishing in this large Labor Day weekend fishing Derby. I took Hunter on his first major fishing trip and we had a blast. Our hosts put together an amazing trip and provided top notch service on their fishing boats! This is a trip of a lifetime and we had a wonderful time, fished with some excellent fishermen, and made some new friends. We stayed at an amazing resort in Bamfield called Mills Landing, which I highly recommend! They had very nice fish processing facilities and super friendly and knowledgeable hosts!
Hunter and I caught our bag limit of fish and was able to bring a good amount home for the freezer. We had salmon for dinner the first night home and it is amazing! Love the pink/orange look whenever we open the deep freezer!
The weather was great overall; one day was partly sunny and the swells were overall small; some days non-existent. I’m prone to motion sickness (I can’t read my phone in the car) and at one point I caught up with a bit of nausea; Hunter had sea legs all the way home; but overall we did well in that department too!
We fished mostly with anchovies hooked up to a plastic head which allowed us to position the bait such that it “rolled” in the water. The roll is important and needs to be nice and sexy for the big fish to have interest. Then up the line was a plastic flasher/dodger which rotated in the water flashing sunlight in about 4 foot (or larger) circles in the water. The line was clipped to a 10 pound downrigger attached to the side of the boat; and we fished anywhere from 65 to 25 feet under the surface.
First, the fish. We caught anywhere from 5 to 10.5 pound Coho salmon, and small to 20 lb Chinook this year. We caught numerous black bass fish that we didn’t know were on the line for a while; and since those were DOA we fed them to the eagles which was a lot of fun to see.
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