Steel Dreams Guide Service - Steel Dreams offers fishing adventures on Washington's premier rivers: the Columbia, Snake, and Grande Ronde as well as Idaho's Clearwater. Take your choice of power sled or drifting for salmon, steelhead, bass or sturgeon. Great pricing, quality equipment, and priceless memories make Steel Dreams the best choice for your next epic fishing adventure.
I grew up on fishing the lower Columbia for sturgeon. I have several pictures on the wall of me at four feet high holding a fish up that was twice the size of me up and nearly falling over. Of course your not supposed to take oversize fish from the water, but that was then and this is now. I once caught one upwards of twelve feet off of the Astoria bridge. Of course, that was when I had a friend with a boat, and it was only a two hour drive to the launch, not five, or a thousand million hours, depending on traffic.
I read an article about sturgeon in the lower Snohomish in an old fishing journal that I found while researching new and exciting alpine lakes, and it gave away the best fishing spots for sturgeon in Ebey and Steamboat sloughs. Of course, they told you to take a boat, but according to google earth it might be possible to get to it by hiking through Spencer Island park. So, Jack Bauer and I geared up to take a looksie.
So first off, Spencer Island is right across from the sewage treatment plant of Everette. Which is a scary facility. You can see the propellers churning the sewage sky high in a giant lake surrounded by a dike about five feet high. Which scared me, because I know the Snohomish river can run really high and if that lake were to flood over the dike, millions of gallons of sewage would roam the river into Puget Sound. That would be really gross. Personally, I'd prefer more than a three or four foot pourous wall of gravel and mud between me and the sewage, but whatever. It must work.
So when you get there, there are signs EVERYWHERE about dogs. Pick up thier poo! Pack it out! Keep them leashed! Needless to say, Jack was upset by these signs and prompltly urinated on them. And then, on the walk in, he just HAD to try and poo on them. Silly dog. He was backing straight into them with his butt in the air. In front of all the sewage workers to boot. So I had to stop him naturally, until I could find a stupid sign that had a baggy dispenser for Jack's bowel movement. What I don't understand is how a couple dog bowel movements leaching into soil contaminated by human waste could hurt anything. Shrug.
So We got to the island, and the park was equally dog UNFRIENDLY. Signs every where, NO DOGS ALLOWED. This made Jack even more unhappy. So I couldn't take the route to the fishing hole that I wanted to. But apparently half of Spencer Island belongs to WDFW, and they let dogs go there, and it's a hunting preserve. Right next to the city's wildlife preserve. I would be a confused duck, because half of the island is covered with patronizing signs about how humans are decimating wildlife populations and habitats, and the other is filled with signs about how to safely kill them and avoiding being shot by hunters while hilking.
Jack chased a big heron, which was really scary, because the heron was right next to the gravel trail, which involved lots of splashing and barking, and the heron pecking Jack on the back, which made him yelp. I don't think the heron was used to little dogs like Jack with an attitude of a much larger dog. I had to laugh, because he came back and looked at me like he was so proud.
So spencer Island is pretty cool. It's an estuary, apparently it used to be a farm, but they let the dikes break and now it floods at high tide. I saw at least 20 different species of birds that you don't usually see, and so did Jack. It's covered in blackberries, and brush, but it's very pretty.
When I got to the end of the trail it was about a half hour past low tide and the slough was pretty good looking. I remember catching oversized sturgeon in water that looked like this on the Chehalis near Aberdeen, so I figured why not? But there was a father and daughter fishing there, which was interesting.
I asked him what he was fishing for, and he said "whitefish". With a worm on the bottom and a tiny little hook. He looked at my big hook as I set up and said, "you'll never catch something with a hook that big". I was okay with that, but I used it anyways. And I sat there not getting anything, while he pulled in fish after fish. His daughter and him probably caught thirty fish while I was there, all of which were living in a plastic Safeway sack, writhing around, just out of Jack's reach, because he was desperate to roll in it.
But they weren't whitefish. They were suckers! I've never heard of until today someone fishing for and keeping suckerfish. It was weird, but apparantly they taste really good. Anyways, he kept moving around from spot to spot which I thought was weird, but about two hours afterwards, I find out why, when he apears over the edge of the grass and tells me, "You're gonna be stranded! YOu can't get back now! Sorry, I forgot to tell you." Oops. So now I'm stuck on a muddy little grass island, with Jack standing next to the shore as a floating stick slowly twitches closer to him which is OBVIOUSLY alive and threatening his masters life, because with each tiny surge in the current he's growling at it something fierce, his hair raised up, his teeth bared. It was hilarious. I got the stick out of the water for him, but it still seemed alive. He jumped and lunged back and forth at it, still not strusting it's muddy twigs twitching in the wind. He must have stared at that stick for a good half hour, very agitated.
So I was talking to the guy, who wasn't native, he had a sorta russian accent, but I don't think he was Russian, and he said yesterday he was there and he caught a trout at least two feet long. I asked if it was a steelhead or rainbow and he said no, so it must have been a Dolly. This didn't surprise me, because I saw lots of troutlike fish jumping around. I didn't know if they were suckers or trout though, and my pole was too big to cast a spinner, so I patiently waited for a bigger fish.
While I didn't catch anything, I did hook something at almost high tide that was larger than anything I'd seen so far, except that I wasn't paying attention (this was during the stick/Jack incident, which thouroughly wasted a good 20 minutes of hilarity) and it saw my two ounce weight under a big stick. I did not see what this fish was, whether it was a trout or a sturgeon will remain a mystery. Maybe it was just a giant sucker. I'll never know.
While I did get a little bored and catch some suckerfish and sculpins, I didn't catch what I wanted. Jack did eat probably the smallest sculpin I've ever caught, about an inch long, as it let go off the hook. It started to fall to the ground, where I was going to throw it back, but somehow Jack managed to catch in out of the air in his jowls. I love fishing with that dog. Best fishing dog EVER.
Oh, yea. The tide came in, and I was stranded on an island. I had to wade through 20 feet of moving water to get back to the trail. I wasn't very worried though, if it were any deeper than a foot or so, I could have waited an hour until the tide went back down. Jack loved it though, he got so muddy and wet just bounding through the grassy water.
Thanks for the report, it was more like a good story! Gotta love Jack!
I would love to see that article. I've been trying to figure out the sturgeon fishery in the lower Snohomish all year, and have only pulled two fish out of it (both on the same day) one around 8' and the other 51" that was taken home and made the best fish tacos! Where were the holes the article spoke of if you don't mind sharing?
Great read. So "The Russian" was keeping northern pikeminnow (aka squawfish)? That's cool.
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Steel Dreams Guide Service - Steel Dreams offers fishing adventures on Washington's premier rivers: the Columbia, Snake, and Grande Ronde as well as Idaho's Clearwater. Take your choice of power sled or drifting for salmon, steelhead, bass or sturgeon. Great pricing, quality equipment, and priceless memories make Steel Dreams the best choice for your next epic fishing adventure.
