Scudley Do Right
Legend
yeah
Puget Sound
- Thread starter Stonedfish
- Start date
Does anyone still catch big mondo herring in Puget Sound? We used to catch them back in the day and referred to them as horse herring.
SF
SF
Great post! Would you mind sharing your herring technique? I'd like to try that. My dad and mom were dutch and we always ate pickled herring
I use a sabiki rig, size 10 or 12, six hook rig to catch baitfish. I tried sabiki rods both commercial and DIY with PVC pipes but they feel like a broomstick. I prefer to use a regular casting rod, line counter reel and store it all rigged up inside a large PVC tube to keep hooks out of harm and ready to deploy. You look for bait in your fish finder, or for feeding birds if the bait is shallow. You drop your sabiki at the depth the bait is at, image below shows bait (#2) between 125 and the bottom, #1 shows the sabiki going down. I only jig for the first hookup, then just wait a few seconds for the sabiki to load, wait too long and a dogfish may destroy your sabiki. #3 shows a sabiki loaded with herring, see next picture.
If you want to keep the herring alive, you can unhook them into a live well, bucket with water that you would have to keep on refreshing, etc. If you want to kill them soon, you can put them on ice, slush of icy seawater, etc.
I have not tried pickling them, I either use them for bait or I grill them whole. If fresh and small you can grill them guts and all, if frozen or larger take out the guts. Whatever you do, dry them well so they turn golden and crispy on the grill on high. Salt them generously. Maybe 3-4 mins per side, should be done right before the catch on fire! This batch I basted them on chimichurri and garnished with parsley, they came out great!
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SF -
Historically PS herring lived to age 9 (those horse herring) but now adult herring mortality has increased significantly. An example of that change, for the Cherry Point population; in the late 1970s that mortality rate was in the 20 to40% range and by the 1990 to 2008 period the average increased to 68%. In 1975 the average age of adult herring was 5.98 and by 2008 that age had declined 2.0. With a younger population one would both a decline in both the annual spawning biomass and abundance stability.
For the last 50 years WDFW (formerly WDF) has collected annual estimates of PS herring "population" spawning biomasses. Historically 5-year update reports. While the underlying data for those reports appear to still be collected those updated reports was last published in 2019.
For those interested in diving deeper in PS herring the
"2016 Washington State Herring Stock Status Report. September 2019" would be good place to start.
Curt
Just based on personal observations, the herring this year seem to be a bit bigger than the last few years. There also might be more of them - or there might just have been a good recruitment year a few years ago, and we are just seeing a big cohort got through. It’s hard to tell the difference between a big school of big herring and a massive school of small herring just based on glancing at a fish finder screen. The salmon seem to be happy with it though, some absolute chonks out there, stuffed with herring and still eating lures.
Smallest size you can find. A lot of sabikis are designed for bigger species, not optimized for herring
Scudley Do Right
Legend
Gamakatsu Sabiki/Smelt Rig - Size 12 - Dick Smith's Live Bait & Tackle
www.dicksmithslivebait.com
This is the one I remember working the best.
MA10 is at 121% of quota, so no extra days.
@VMP @Chucker
WDFW mentioned during our meeting today they received a lot of comments regarding the staggered 9 / 10 openers and will be looking at that more moving forward, so others had similar concerns as yours.
I’d again recommend everyone submit comments on what you’d like to see on these fisheries next year.
SF
@VMP @Chucker
WDFW mentioned during our meeting today they received a lot of comments regarding the staggered 9 / 10 openers and will be looking at that more moving forward, so others had similar concerns as yours.
I’d again recommend everyone submit comments on what you’d like to see on these fisheries next year.
SF
Scudley Do Right
Legend
I was out all 6 days. It's anecdotal but neither seemed all that more crowded than when they were both open. I'm guessing you end up with 3 days total vs 6.
Might also depend on what the consequences of going 30% and 20% over quota for each of the areas are. 6 days sounds nice, but I would take 3-4 days for kings if it returned us to coho and pinks remain open on all other days after the July 15th opener.
Scudley Do Right
Legend
Mooching for Kings is might favorite salmon fishing but in Puget Sound it's pretty much a memory at this point. My wife wants to move to the peninsula anyway. Might just squeeze a little more out of it and fish PA. Either way 3 days or 6 it isn't much reason to own a boat.
From my perspective / personal experience it was as crowded and chaotic as I have ever seen it, at least MA10. Kind of like bumper cars, boat edition. First time I have seen the most popular MA10 underwater land mass/fishing bank as hectic as it typically gets on the most popular underwater land mass/fishing bank in MA9. Just from what I saw: 3 boats with crossed downrigger lines, multiple instances of trollers snagging moochers / jiggers gear, multiple close calls to the point of people screaming/cussing at each other either cause their boats were about to crash or a hot fish was about to get into someone's oblivious trolling path or any other reasons. See picture below for example: you can see 2 boats next to each other trying to disentangle their downrigger lines/gear, another boat about to net a king, trollers going in between drifting/static jiggers / moochers. I for one fish for the experience, not a good one at this level of combat fishing.
I don't think is that easy as going from 6 days to 3 days if we do away with staggered openers, we would agree that is a very dismall opportunity at this point, either way. The issue is low abundance of chinook stocks that act as a weak link for the rest of the fisheries (even if other runs are in a beter state, but can't be selectively fished in the ocean) and the fact that there is just too many people fishing! Compounding those issues, concentrating hundreds of boats/fisherman in relatively small areas and for short windows of opportunity inevitably leads to well know problems as seeing in other struggling fisheries.
Derby fisheries are ugly and dangerous, concentrate fishing effort and provide incentives for bad things to happen: misreporting, highgrading and discard mortality, accidents, in-season management issues; bad for the fish and bad for the fishermen. Back to the 6 days or 3 days, when we had concurrent openers the fishing effort was spread accross different areas, which meant that we often got either an open ended season that would end when quota was reached, or fixed say 3-day openers followed by re-evaluation of potential further opportunities and additional openers. This staggered approach all but guarantees there won't be additional opportunities as each area gets sequentially hammered and overharvested given the madness of a derby fishery and inability to have in season adjustments in such a short time. This year MA9 went 31% over the quota, based on @Stonedfish post MA10 went 21% over the quota, those are not small overharvests for the adult quotas, but actually the largest ones by far since COVID for either area, closest one was a 9% over the quota for in MA10 in 2024, when MA10 had 10 days of king retention (3 days at first then many emergency openers of 3, 1, 2, 1 days respectively) whereas MA9 had a total of 7 days in 3 openers. I focused on MA9 and MA10 since those are the areas I mainly fish for salmon, probably simmilar issues for some of the other Marine Areas, at least from a quick look at them.
The writing is on the wall and we seem to be approaching the end of king salmon retention in several areas of Puget Sound, at least it would be nice to not have to fight for the last opportunities with all of us moving between sequential areas at the same time, probably better for the fish and for the fisherman.
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Scudley Do Right
Legend
That's all nothing new in my experience. We lost one fish to a downrigger on the bar but that's part of the deal there.
Ramming speed! I was actually thinking about putting turning spikes on my boat sides, kind of like the Ben-Hur charriot race scene...
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I was out late Friday evening, and it wasn’t too bad. Saturday was the worst I have ever seen anywhere in the sound other than Elliott bay - but at least there everyone is going in one direction or the exact opposite direction. Out in MA10, people were going any way they felt like and gear was being crossed all over the place.
WDFW has data on the number of boats out there from flyovers don’t they?
wanderingrichard
Life of the Party
Good goddess if it was that bad on the sound what was it like in the toilet bowl of drano lake ?
Scudley Do Right
Legend
If someone was so inclined they could probably look up the number of anglers checked at Eddie Vine this year vs years past. That might be an indicator that there where more boats there than ever.