September 22nd column

[Pete Heley]

The Crab Bounty Contest has been running for three weeks now and and as of last Sunday morning, 14 tagged crabs have been turned in. Each lucky crabber that catches a tagged crab needs to take it, complete with tag, to the Sportsman Cannery where they will give you a hat and return your crab after taking down the tag number. At the contest’s conclusion on October 1st, if the number matches the number currently in a local bank vault, that lucky crabber will win a thousand dollars. If that particular crab is not turned in, there will be a drawing at contests end for three cash prizes of $500, $300 and $200. It’s a great contest and makes crabbing even more exciting than it normally is and crabbing right now is very, very good.
On the downside, crabbing misbehavior always seems to spike during the contest as crabbers infrequently seem more interested in finding out whether other crabbers have a tagged crab in their rings, traps or pots than they are in paying attention to their own gear. A deputy sheriff with our local office advised that the best way to protect one’s gear is to mark it in such a way that it is easily identifiable or really stands out. I know the same technique has worked for some male smokers who ended up buying a pink lighter because it didn’t “wander off”. The same strategy would probably work for crab catching devices, although after spray painting them in a gaudy, easily recognizable color I would try to cover the paint odor with some sort of fish scent. Trying to apply the same strategy to the large surface floats is not nearly as effective as they are easily cut off. However, having easily distinguishable floats with the crabber’s phone number on it can’t hurt. The best defense against such misbehavior is to stay within eyesight of your crabbing gear even while fishing.
While crabbing by sport anglers in the ocean is legal until, but not during, October 16th, the crabbing in the lower Umpqua River at Winchester Bay should be good for several weeks after that.
An extremely encouraging event was seeing some anglers at the East Basin cleaning station cleaning a number of larger-than-average-sized tuna last Friday. They reported that they caught them only 40 miles out - which is much, much closer than they have been recently. Hopefully, the conditions will hold long enough for other anglers to take advantage of it.
The South Jetty/Triangle area has been somewhat ignored amidst the salmon fishing activity, but the few anglers fishing it are still catching bottomfish. Greenling, striped surfperch, cabezon, rockfish and lingcod are all possible catches and one angler last Saturday hooked and landed a wolf eel.
After several weeks of being considered the top salmon fishery on the Oregon Coast and still providing good salmon fishing, the Umpqua must now share the limelight with several other streams. The Coos River is fishing at its peak right now and according to Joe Cook at the Bite’s On in Empire, a number of chinooks weighing more than 40 pounds have been landed the last couple of weeks. The Coquille and Siuslaw rivers hasn’t quite peaked yet, but there have been some very large salmon landed in the tidewater reaches of each stream. The lower Rogue River has busted loose recently with several salmon weighing 50 or more pounds taken over the last two weeks.
At last weekend’s Coos Basin Salmon Derby, eight of the ten heaviest salmon were caught by anglers from either North Bend or Coos Bay. Brian Reiber, of North Bend, won the event with a 38 pound seven ounce chinook and Mike Hoyt, also of North Bend, placed second with a 31 pound five ounce fish.
Salmon fishing on the lower Umpqua remains good and better than that for a few of the more accomplished guides. There are still plenty of chinooks in the river below Reedsport, but cooling river temperatures will most likely mean that they will be more likely to move upriver rather than stay where some tidal influence will slightly lower river temperatures. Cohos are starting to dominate the catch for the sport anglers (although the guides seem to be catching chinooks consistently) and while the daily salmon limit remains two adult fish, it’s kind of nice to be able to keep one wild coho per day (wild coho season limit is only two fish on the Umpqua). During the unclipped or wild coho season on certain Oregon coastal rivers there is a slight change to the regulations regarding jack salmon. The jacks still have to measure between 15 and 20-inches for cohos and 15 and 24-inches for chinooks. While the coho jacks still have to be finclipped, anglers are allowed to retain one unclipped coho jack per day with no seasonal limit.
A few salmon have been caught near the mouth of Winchester Creek in Winchester Bay’s East Boat Basin and one angler, late last week, even hooked several salmon on streamer flies while flyfishing from the bank. As for the shorebound “spinner flingers”, they are catching fair numbers of salmon, even it it all seems to happen in a several minute long hot spell. About 90 percent of the spinners they are buying weigh about an ounce, or more, have a hammered silver blade and a squidlike body on the hook and is either pink or chartreuse in color.
There have been a number of reports of boats running full speed past other boats and if everyone so effected would use their camera to take a picture of the boat, preferably with the boat registration numbers in the photo, and then immediately made arrangements to email the photo to the sheriff’s department along with a description of the incident and other anglers or boaters that witnessed the event, there would most likely be enough citations issued to ensure more thoughtful boating behavior. It most likely would not hurt to send the same information to the Oregon State Marine Board which may come up with a more permanent way to address the problem. Even if one didn’t forward the photo and incident report, the act of taking a flash photo, if seen by the offenders, would probably cause them a few sleepless nights.
As for other fishing opportunities, trout fishing in the area’s larger lakes, especially Tenmile, is still productive. Afternoon and evening fishing for largemouth bass has been fair, but most panfish haven’t been biting that well. Smallmouth bass are biting fairly well in tidewater areas of the Umpqua above Brandy Bar and even better in the stretches of the river above tidewater. The South Umpqua River, as of September 16th, is now closed to all fishing.