This year’s sockeye run offers up good eats

Medical studies have shown that eating fish is good for your brain.  If that is the case, I should be quickly approaching some sort of average intelligence level based on the amount of fresh salmon I have consumed recently.

The past five nights I have dined on fresh sockeye salmon three times.  And I believe it is on the menu again tonight.  Served with local fresh sweet corn on the cob, and some sliced melon, man, it doesn’t get any better than that.

Now a few of you may be asking, “where did you get all of that fresh sockeye, Rob?”

No, unfortunately, I didn’t just get back from Alaska.  I caught a bunch of the beautiful little salmon in the Columbia River, not three hours from home.

Right now there are more than 200,000 sockeye in the upper Columbia near the towns of Pateros and Brewster.  The feisty fish are on their way to spawn in Lake Osoyoos on the Washington/Canadian border.  To get to Lake Osoyoos, the fish must migrate up the Okanogan River.

But the Okanogan, this time of year gets very warm, so the salmon hold out in the Columbia, waiting for the waters to cool to complete their journey.  As they hold in the bigger, cooler Columbia, they become accessible to anglers and they are more eager to bite a lure, or bait, or even a red hook.

I’ve fished the Columbia before above Wells Dam near Brewster for the summer chinook that also are available there this time of year, and during those trips have caught several sockeye almost on accident. The trip up to Brewster last Friday was specifically to catch the great- eating little salmon.

I got a call from former Yakima resident and now well-known Lake Chelan fishing guide Anton Jones of Darrel and Dad’s Guide Service. He had an empty seat on one of his boats that was going to fish at Brewster and asked if I wanted to jump in. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away.

Former Selah resident, now guide Andy Byrd was the captain of the boat, and with the able assistance of guide Jeff Witkowski, we were into fish almost from the minute we dropped our gear in the water at first light.  When the last fish was dropped into the cooler at high noon, we had caught 18 very respectable sockeyes running from 2 to 5 pounds, with the majority being cookie cutters in the four pound range.

Even with their long journey up the Columbia, over several dams and hundreds of miles of river, the sockeye are in remarkable shape.  Some have lost their shiny, silvery color, but the meat is still as red as you’ll find on sockeye anywhere, and the flavor is outstanding when grilled on the barbecue with just a little butter and lemon juice!

Byrd and Witkowski have been fishing for the sockeye for a couple of weeks and pretty well had the rigging for catching them dialed in.  Actually their rigging was pretty simple.  They ran a double red hook setup on a leader that was anywhere from 10 to 20 inches below a 00 silver dodger.

Above the hooks they had 5 or 6 red beads and above that they had a silver mylar smiley blade that turned as an attractor.  When I go up there again, I’m going to try a small Spin-N-Glo with mylar wings as the attractor because I think that would work as well.  On each of the hooks they would place a small chunk of prawn that was dyed bright pink.

The whole outfit was let out 20 feet or so and then hooked to a downrigger that was lowered from 20 to 30 feet in depth.  We trolled fairly slow in 30 to 70 feet of water just outside the mouth of the Okanogan.

Byrd said previous days the catching hadn’t been quite as good as the day we fished, but they were still averaging four to five fish per angler, which isn’t bad at all.  The limit on sockeye is six per day.

Typically the fishing for the sockeye remains good for at least a couple of weeks.  And the fishing for the big summer chinook there should start picking up any day.  If you go, take plenty of sunscreen and a large umbrella. The temperatures there are similar to here, and there is rarely a breeze and no shade.

I’ll be heading back to Brewster soon–for the big kings, and for some more sockeye, because there may be no better eating salmon.  Adding to the intelligence quotient is an added bonus.  And believe me, some of us need it desperately!
• Rob Phillips is a freelance outdoor writer and partner in the advertising firm of Smith, Phillips & DiPietro. He can be reached at rwphillips@spdadvertising.com.