Pacemaker Fishing Forum

As some of you know, I moved from Reston VA to Vancouver WA early in 2010 and occasionally I write a report about fishing out here.

Most of the time I fish on the Columbia River. However, on March 10 I went fishing for the first time on the Willamette River, the objective was to get a keeper size sturgeon (38 inches to 54 inches, it's not legal to keep bigger ones or smaller ones).

I fished with three others on a guided trip at Oregon City, OR... just below the Willamette Falls. (22 miles from my home)


We took turns with the hook-ups and you kept fishing until you got a keeper. We are only allowed to keep one. We are required by law to use barbless hooks and had some action with fish that spit the hooks before we got them to the boat. The other guys caught and released some that were too small, and by dumb luck I had the opposite problem.

After losing a hook spitter I got involved with a 7+ foot monster that took 25 minutes to bring to the boat.


On my next turn I had another hook spitter, then the other guys got their limits. So, then they are watching and waiting for me to get a keeper so that we could go home. Well, I got hooked up with another monster, 6 foot this time. I already had aching muscles from the first monster, so I shared this one with the other guys and we kept passing the rod around so that everyone got some pullage. It took 15 minutes to bring it to the boat.


Then, I finally got a nice keeper (45 inches, about 27 lbs).




It was the bigger keeper of the day, I got 9 lbs of filets out of it.


By the way, we have a problem out here with sea lion predation. They have learned that sturgeon and spring salmon school up below Willamette Falls at this time of year. The Department of Fish and Wildlife gets seriously concerned about the amount of fish that they are killing at times. Animal lovers recently got a court order which put a stop to killing them, so now the Department of Fish and Wildlife tries to scare them away from the area by shooting at them with rubber bullets and some kind of percussion shells that make loud scarey explosions in the water without creating any harmful shrapnel. We saw them doing this during this fishing trip.


Also, they are known to steal fish from anglers. Someone put a video online which shows an example of a sea lion stealing a guy's fish.

http://www.whoisthemonkey.com/videos/16 … teals-fish

That has not happened to me yet

Last edited by Bob B (Mar-12-11 4:27PM)