The vast majority of inbound salmon travel through this area to all points south. It’s most commonly sold frozen at local tackle shops. Nowadays, fresh herring is difficult to come by. You can fish in the open water or tuck in shallow along the beaches to target these fish. By early June, Summer Chinook begin to trickle into the Puget Sound as well, and this is the very beginning of my favorite salmon mooching time… Summer!If I could spend every summer day on the water mooching, I would. Here are a few of the most well known mooching spots. 1990). There are no rod holders, no captain doing all the work for you. When it gets a little breezy, Coho mooching can really turn on. Check out Coho Salmon can be found in Puget Sound year-round, just like Chinook. So naturally that is what we use for mooching. Smelt, herring, and shiner perch should be good enough to get you going for bait for bottomfish like flounder and dogfish. Herring deposit their eggs primarily on marine … It offers some fantastic salmon fishing spots. There are large underwater banks such as Possession off of Whidbey Island, Jeff Head east of Kitsap’s Indianola, Kingston, and Mid Channel Bank near Port Townsend.
Creating a double whammy of mooching fun. It’s best to find one or two places and spend some time learning how the tides impact where salmon congregate. This independence at the subpopulation level confers a stabilizing effect on the overall Puget Sound spawning stock, with herring being as much as three times more stable in the face of environmental perturbation than a single population unit of the same size. The bigger the tidal exchange, the more concentrated the bait and the faster it will move. Most of these spots are easy to get to if you are launching your boat at Seattle, Edmonds, Kingston, Bremerton or Bainbridge Island. Coho can be found out in the shipping lanes in the middle of Admiralty Inlet, but also travel along the beaches of Whidbey Island. Puget Sound sport salmon fishing takes place in an ever-changing environment. It’s such a mystery sometimes, but that is what makes it so fun!Coho Salmon tend to be more surface oriented. Herring is the main forage for Puget Sound Chinook and Coho Salmon. They stop and feed at all the famous mooching haunts. There are pronounced land points that stick out into the Sound and give us areas where the currents push in concentrations of herring and feeding salmon. That’s a huge tide exchange! Conditions vary hourly due to tide and current fluctuations, and you must be prepared to make instant revisions in tackle and/or fishing methods in order to be successful. Early morning high is at 1:31am at about 12′ high. Waiting until the end of summer when their biological clock tells them it’s time to head a little further down the Sound and into the river to spawn.September marks a key transition point on the mooching calendar. When the weather is hot, I like to have a small ice pack in the cooler to keep the bait from getting warm and soft.
The currents will soften as the tide stops ebbing at the 8:42am tide change, and eventually will pick up steam as the afternoon incoming tide floods in. Has anyone ever done any bait fishing in the south Puget Sound? You can also brine the herring the night before if you wish.