I’ve actually seen that one bunches of times on the Sacramento and Feather rivers in the spring and fall. It’s just so strange when you think about a salmon swimming along and then smelling something tasty, pointing his nose down into the silt and gobbling up a bait that’s lying on the bottom. A funny image, isn’t it?
Years ago on a small river in Southwest Alaska, I had clients fishing eggs under bobbers. The lodge didn’t have any bobbers that season, so I was improvising, using big Cheaters pegged to the line with toothpicks. With three guys in the boat, I had each rod rigged with a different color bobber—one chartreuse, one orange and one hot pink so I could keep track of whose line was doing what.
We had five kings one day come up to the surface and eat the bobbers…just like bass on top-water frogs. The interesting thing was they all hit the pink bobber and left the other two completely alone! The same scenario occurred several other days on the river that summer—and it was always the pink bobber that the kings wanted to blow up on.
Of course, I have caught a few kings over the years on pink worms while steelhead fishing which is kinda nutty, but not nearly as much as the springer my buddy caught this year in Washington on a black/chartreuse tail Mad River Steelhead Worm under a bobber.
Speaking of black stuff, I had a season on the Nushagak River in Alaska when the kings showed a real preference for that color. I stumbled, quite by accident, onto the fact that the river’s chinook loved all-black leeches while trout fishing. In fact, they were so into black that I decided to do a little impromptu test on a small tributary. In hole after hole stacked with kings, I’d let a buddy go through with good eggs under a bobber and then I would come in behind with a fly rod stripping black leech patterns. When it was said and done, I caught a dozen or so more kings than he did.
Now, I won’t be ditching my eggs for flies anytime soon, but on that given day the fish were crazy for the black bugs. And I guess that’s my point here: kings are moody, unpredictable buggers and there’s no telling what you might get one to bite.
Down in the California Delta where I do a lot of striper fishing, we have caught plenty of kings on swimbaits, Rat-L-Traps and jerk baits. One that really stands out was a chrome springer from a couple years back that smacked a tiny crawfish-pattern crankbait fished in about five feet of water for smallmouth bass.
A friend hooked a 30-pound chinook last season in three feet of water on a flooded island in the Delta while flipping a rubber crawfishy-looking bait in the tules for largemouth. Way weird!
I could go on and on here, but it would be fun to hear from some of you guys. I bet some of you have some kooky salmon stories too. Feel free to share some with me. You can reach me through my website, www.fishwithjd.com