Let's hear about your Hanford Reach fishing adventures for 2008. Sounds like it has the potential to be a hot season!

I have a trip planned in October- should be good. Last year on a guided trip we had 6 fish on 4 rods. All on eggs.

GAS $$- Share :

If you have an extra seat on your boat and want to share costs, let me know. I have all my gear but my boat is no good for the reach.

PM If interested.
Picture of one from last year.

Going to be a couple weeks, at least, before I try the URBs

I'll start hitting it locally around the middle of September. It should be a great season with lots of water and lots of fish! A couple of fun derbies to enter too... the Jeff Johansen memorial derby is September 27th and the KC/Tri-Cities Prep derby is October 4th and 5th. And there are weekly prizes for the KC/TCP derby starting September 13th included as part of the entry fee. Both derbies are $25 and both are great charities.

Right now it sounds like the action is at Buoy 10 - absolutely rocking!

The counts are starting to climb at Bonneville so it won't be long before we have some fish up here. Until then there's always the Gorge. Lots of steelhead this year.

I say it every year, but THIS is the year I put in my time and catch some fish on the reach. The cruel irony is that chrome steelhead are running all through our area at the same time--and I'm much better at catching them! Still, a shot at a 30 lb king is hard to pass...

Last year I managed to offer/take open seats a coupe times; I'll try to announce open seats a couple days ahead of time.

Good news for us--they're closing the B10 chinook fishery early because of unexpectedly good catch rates. Even better is that coded wire tag surveys suggest that a larger-than-expected proportion of the fish caught are URBs bound for our neck of the river. Let's hope it's not like the springer run where down river catch rates were superbe but the run seemed to fizzle out before it made it to us. At least it sounds like they are practicing a bit of caution down below, and that's good to see. If the counts at Bonny sky-rocket, maybe they can even re-open things down below.

Amen!

I'm actually sneaking down there for the last day of the B10 season so hopefully the high catch rates continue through the closing day! But I agree, it's good to see some caution in the season management.

Holy cow- over 20K salmon in two days already... this is shaping up to be an awesome (or at least awesomely early) return! We could be fishing up here in just a couple of weeks.

I went to the Wanapum area today. Three rods, for 4 hours. Three hookups, and two fish landed, all small jacks. Some fish rolling, and marking a few. The fish counts are very low, but there are fish around.

Thanks for the early report. The big ones will be along soon.

When does Vernita tend to Start to heat up? I'm heading out of town in late September and want to try and hit it a few times before I go.

Normally it gets good the 3rd week of September. This year... I'm thinking it's going to turn on early, like next week.

I went down on 9-3-08 and we did not hit a thing in the King Hole. We used sardine wrapped Kwikfish, Baitbusters, Spinney and eggs as well as herring. We did see some roll. The fish checker said that he had not seen a fish caught there yet. He said that it should be another week until it starts up.

Thanks for the report! I'm trying tomorrow morning and will report back.

Score! 2 for 3 on K16's at Vernita on Friday. Can't wait to go back... looks like it'll be Sunday. We also tried herring, superbaits, and mag warts but all the action was on the kwiks.