Just a few flights and a drive away

[sharonkayak]

I flew up to Oregon to help my dad check off more of his bucket list.
We get the call the night before that the fish are biting but we need to drive to astoria, which is two hours out of portland. Only one and a half hours on the way home with me driving.

Oregon fishing regulations are stricter than we have. You cant use live bait within 3 miles of shore, also you can only catch 5 king salmon a season and one a day (24 inches minimum).

sturgeon are the same way except the fish need to be between something like 40 and 55 inches. It takes sturgeon about 16 years to get to be keeper sizes.

So we head out to the open ocean just outside the columbia river gorge. The king salmon have been biting the last few days and the boats have been getting limits. I ended up with one king but he was just barely a keeper. I had lost a bunch that day as well. I would like to blame it on Oregons regulation that all hooks have to be barbless! You can call bs on me if you want since I didnt take a picture I wasnt too proud of the little dink! Especially after seeing another salmon on out boat that was 25lbs

Our next mission of the day was to find some sturgeon, We picked up someone that was doing research. she had asked us if she could film us catching them. That was great since our 6 hour trip was turned more into a 10 hour mission. To find these we went back inside the river and anchored.
Its a waiting game with your bait on the bottom. anchovies or some type of crab for bait. We each ended up landing a few of them but you can only keep on day.

This one was 54 inches and weighed maybe 40 lbs.