Blackmouth Fishing off the Edmonds Oil Docks

Lately the world seems like it’s burning down around me, but I know I’m lucky. I have a wife who loves me, a good fishing buddy, and I have a Montauk. Plus, it’s finally fishing season. On the first week of April our much-delayed Blackmouth season began, but I almost decided not to fish because I was so busy with work. However, the weather forecast was excellent, so I decided that a day on the water was just what I needed to put my troubles out of my mind. We made sure to seize the day and be on the water before sunrise. “Blackmouth” is a fisherman’s term for resident chinook salmon, which are hatchery fish that never leave Puget Sound. While ocean run chinook return in summer, blackmouth are available to catch in late winter and early spring. Normal salmon head for the ocean at about two or three months of age, but some are held at the hatchery until they are a year old. This seems to suppress their instinct to go to sea, which creates a fishery outside of summer. This year Fish and Wildlife decided to delay the opening until April to allow the fish to get bigger before being caught. 

You are only allowed to catch them in certain areas, so we had to travel south of Edmonds before dropping our lines. It was the farthest we’d ever gone from Everett in the boat, and it took almost an hour to get there by sea. Of all the possible fishing grounds, we chose the Edmonds Oil Docks at Point Wells because it was the closest. Although it was a little chilly, it was a great day to be on the water. The sea remained smooth all day. It was about 8:00 by the time we got to the oil docks and dropped our gear. Then we started trolling north and south, never more than a mile or two from the docks, starting shallow and then going deeper. At first we used a new kind of lure I had prepared called an “anchovy helmet”. It’s literally a little metal helmet that you can stick a whole whole anchovy into, which holds it in place just above a standard double hook rig. You stick the upper hook through the anchovy to give it a little bend, which makes it “swim” like a live fish. An advantage of using larger bait like that is that you don’t tend to catch sublegal fish (called “shakers”), which wastes your time and injures them. 

Unfortunately I had tied the leaders way too short, which made the bait swim far too vigorously to look like a real fish. The blackmouth weren’t fooled. After a while, we gave up and Dave switched to his tried-and-true squid rig, and cut up a little piece of anchovy to bait the upper hook. I switched to a small “spoon”, which is a shiny piece of metal, painted on one side, which visually simulates a fish. Not long after, my rod started wiggling, but not hard enough to come off the downrigger clip. As expected, I pulled up a shaker, a little baby blackmouth about a foot long, and safely released him without bringing him aboard. Then, Dave’s rod popped off the downrigger and started shaking really hard. He started reeling in what was clearly a big fish, while I got out the net. The fish took lots of line and got tired, which made it easy to scoop a net under him when he finally got to the boat. It was a good sized legal Blackmouth which weighed in at 11 pounds. 

That was my cue to switch to a squid rig, since it worked for Dave. After that we tried various lures for the rest of the day, but we got no more bites. While resetting my gear, my line came loose from the downrigger clip four times in a row. Finally I switched to my backup rod and had no more problems. I suspect that the scented oil I put on my spoon had gotten onto my line, making it slippery. At 1:00 we decided to call it good and head home. We had a nice ride on the way back. Between being out of practice and not getting much sleep, we kept making silly mistakes. We drove all the way home with one downrigger extended. When we got to the fuel dock I heard a strange noise whenever the master electrical switch was on. I even took the engine cowling off to investigate. We finally realized that we had accidentally knocked the bilge pump switch on after hitting a big boat wake, so it was running all the time. At the boat launch, we tried to dock with the fenders still in. Fortunately, no harm was done to the boat. A seal swam right up to us there begging for fish scraps. We came back tired, hungry, and happy, with one very respectable fish in the bag, and another great experience under our belts. It would prove to be the last day of the season. Sundays were closed, and on Monday Fish and Wildlife closed the Area 10 blackmouth fishery because the quota had already been met. It was a poignant reminder to never miss an opportunity to fish.