Salmon Season Opener - Bad weather but Hallibut!

7 fish Sunday 7 fish Monday 0 fish Tuesday

We went out on Sunday and got the bugs worked out, boat ran really well. It's been really slow for everybody bad trolling conditions, nine foot swell at 10 seconds and a lot of wind on top of it. The boats are moving around so much we can't keep a consistent speed which is really important. On top of that the Salmon are deep, 80 fathoms (480 feet) smaller boats like the Harvester can't run all the lines that deep or they'll get tangled up, so we have to run two wires at a time. The guys did good, Bert being a green horn to salmon fishing but catching on quick.

The market is hot. Earth quake in Chili screwed up a lot of fish farming, and the Iceland volcano didn't do any favors for the North Sea farmers either. The price is about six bucks a pound average, worth over 100 dollars a fish. We got a few 25 lbers the first day, but the first night we didn't even sleep starting at the Umpqua and heard some guys on the cape got 15 so we ran all night and got another seven. Got a couple of Halibut -- we're on the incidental Halibut license so we can keep 1 Halibut (32 inches or larger) for every 3 Salmon but we're out of the long line Halibut season for this year (if you recall we got skunked last year anyway). This will let us have fresh halibut when the market is good, rather than doing the crazy 10 hour halibut season.

The season is wide open till the end of June then there are six days of closure in July and some time in August. No fish limits.

The weather looks good for Salmon on Friday with 3 foot swells, till then we're back to crabbing and we still need to get those 70 pots stuck on the beach that got swept up in the last storm.

We've got some video and pics in the can but haven't had time to get them processed. So stay tuned for that.

Stacy and Linsey will be at the Eugene Farmers Market this weekend with some of our fresh smoked Salmon so keep an eye out for them!

Cheers

-The Harvester