First salmon 2023

[Okanagan]

Went out with cousins yesterday, opening day of salt water salmon. Long day and four of us in the boat kept four salmon all about 12 to maybe 13 lbs.  We released one pretty small one though it was legal. Very rough water and I am bruised considerably from bracing and banging on sides of boat, etc.  I caught the first two within ten minutes of each other, about three hours into it. 




 

[Hawks Feather]

Fresh salmon sounds really good, but I don't know if I want to get beat up to catch them. Nice catches by the way.

[Okanagan]

This is cooked with my shortcut to cedar plank method, with thin cedar slats and slabs laid in the fish cooking basket on one side of the salmon.  Seems to impart flaor the same as cooking on a full slab of cedar and is simpler, since we have lots of cedar to split thin slabs from.

[Hawks Feather]

I just finished breakfast, but that looks really good.

[pitw]

Getting beat up by the boat can't be fun.  Te fish look good though.

[Okanagan]

Getting beat up by the boat can't be fun.  Te fish look good though.

Thanks.

We were jigging, and I fish big jigs better when standing, and so I bump into the side of the boat a lot when the boat is really jerking and jolting.  In rough water I brace my thigh against the side of the boat and nearly always end up with a bruise about pocket level, right at the gunwale.  If I have a pocket knife in my pocket, that makes the bruise worse, and I had a pretty good bruise going by the time I moved it to a jacket pocket.

Then, in a convergence of big bashing waves, my cousin gunned the boat to avoid the worst, just as I was shifting position and it caught me off balance.  Hey, I'm closer to 80 than 70.  I fell hard against the side of the boat and our big fish box and landed hard on the deck.  That one still hurts, with a 3 inch diameter hard mass deep in my thigh muscle just below and to one side of my hip bone.  When that reaches the surface it is going to make a HUGE black and blue and green patch.

Lots of salt spray on my glasses all day.  Worth it to me to fish for salmon and catch some, but for the first time in my life, right on the edge of being worth it.  

Big difference from fishing for shad last week on the Columbia River with my BIL.  Hot sun, anchored in flat water, each of us sitting in a comfortable camp chair on the flat deck, hooking shad one after another.

[FinsnFur]

Oh man that looks so good.
Not sure if it's worth the assault and battery but it looks incredible.
Glad ya made it back in one piece