{"id":2213,"date":"2016-03-15T18:12:40","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T18:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/?p=2213"},"modified":"2016-03-15T18:14:59","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T18:14:59","slug":"when-kings-were-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/?p=2213","title":{"rendered":"When Kings were king"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Earl<\/a>
Earl Sande with two kings<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Earl<\/a><\/p>\n

EARL SANDE<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By Earl Sande<\/p>\n

The history of how good salmon fishing was in\u00a0Puget Sound\u00a0can easily be forgotten in one or two generations. Few books were written about local salmon fishing during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when Seattle was considered one of the best places on earth to fish for salmon.<\/p>\n

Enos Bradner was the outdoor editor for the Seattle Times from 1943, when he was 50 years old, until 1970 when he retired. He compiled a book—-The Inside on the Outdoors—–published in 1973 by Superior Publishing. It contains some of his favorite columns written over the years. Reading this book makes one want to jump on a time machine and go back to when salmon was king!<\/p>\n

One of Bradner\u2019s first interviews, in 1943, was with an 86-year old avid sport fisherman by the name of J.D. Loman. This guy came to\u00a0Seattle\u00a0in 1878 when its population was only 3,000. He fished every chance he could, mainly in rivers and streams. He did fish saltwater on occasion, but there were so many salmon and they were so easy to catch that he said it wasn\u2019t much of a sport.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce he went out on a good size boat with an inboard motor off the north end of\u00a0Whidbey Island,\u201d Bradner wrote of Loman. \u201cThere were five men in the boat and they fished four or five hours on an incoming tide, casting out a Tacoma Bait, a sort of revolving spoon.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they caught 225 salmon in that time. During part of the period only three were fishing while the other two cut up and salted down the salmon.\u201d<\/p>\n

How\u2019s that for a day\u2019s fishing on the Sound compared to the present times!<\/p>\n

Around 1913, B.L. Delong and J.W. Lothrop were some of the few steelhead fishermen before there was any daily limit or season. Only eight or nine guys fished for steelhead out of\u00a0Seattle\u00a0back then and it was common to hook 20 or more fish per day on the Stilly, Green, and Skykomish or White rivers.<\/p>\n

About 1929, a few\u00a0Seattle\u00a0salmon fishermen started trolling wooden plugs made back east. They worked so well that local companies started making them with different designs and colors.<\/p>\n

Trolling spoons were also popular and by the late 1940s the new lighter fishing gear with nylon line made mooching with herring possible. Cutting the perfect spinner off the side of a large herring with all the correct angles and hooking it up with two sharp hooks like my grandfather Cecil Baldwin did was a thing of beauty and very effective.<\/p>\n

King salmon fishing in\u00a0Elliott\u00a0Bay\u00a0was pretty good during the third week of August 1944. A few of the fish checked that week included a 38-pounder along with kings weighing 40, 46 and 51 pounds.<\/p>\n

But the really big kings were caught trolling plugs or spoons off\u00a0Hope\u00a0Island\u00a0near La Conner from 1945 to 1965 during the days when huge kings were common in the\u00a0Skagit\u00a0River.<\/p>\n

From 1951 to 1964 twelve kings weighing 60 pounds or more were boated near Hope Island, topped by Mrs. Howard Little\u2019s 70-pounder caught there in 1954. This was the largest king officially weighed in state waters until Chet Gausta boated his 70 and a half pound king at Sekiu in 1964.<\/p>\n

Kings weighing 100 pounds were harvested in the early 1800s, but of course they were never officially weighed.<\/p>\n

Catching big kings around\u00a0Hope\u00a0Island\u00a0tapered off after 1965, but big fish were still being caught at\u00a0Neah\u00a0Bay\u00a0and Sekiu.<\/p>\n

The lower\u00a0Skagit\u00a0River\u00a0was still putting out some nice fish in 1966 when nine kings were taken there weighing from 50 to 64 pounds.<\/p>\n

Some other big fish caught in\u00a0Washington\u00a0waters were Homer Scott\u2019s 33-pound steelhead caught in the\u00a0Snake River\u00a0in 1962, and in 1971, five steelhead weighing more than 30 pounds were caught in state rivers, including Albert English\u2019s 30-pound, two-ounce fish caught from the Skagit River and Clifford Ames\u2019s 32-pound two-ounce steelhead from the Cowlitz.<\/p>\n

About 20 years ago, State biologists found a spawned out male Chinook weighing about 90 pounds on the\u00a0Bogachiel\u00a0River.<\/p>\n

The big time\u00a0Seattle\u00a0sport fishing days were from 1935 to 1955, during which fishing techniques went from hand-lining with lots of lead to mooching with light gear.<\/p>\n

Bradner also wrote: \u201cAs salmon fishing declined in\u00a0Seattle\u00a0waters so did the boat rental business. In the 1950s, the heyday of salmon fishing here, well over 1,000 fishing boats plied the two\u00a0Seattle\u00a0harbors on weekends. Then there were 16 boat houses serving\u00a0Seattle\u00a0waters.<\/p>\n

For the record, the boat houses at\u00a0Elliott\u00a0Bay\u00a0were Ernie\u2019s, Lloyd\u2019s, Harry\u2019s, Healy\u2019s,\u00a0Harbor\u00a0Island, Scotty\u2019s, and\u00a0West Seattle.<\/p>\n

Ballard was served by Ballard, Baranoff\u2019s, Carrol\u2019s, Gene\u2019s, Oli\u2019s, Ray\u2019s, Reed\u2019s, and\u00a0Salmon\u00a0Bay.<\/p>\n

Lloyd retired in 1966 and today there are no boat houses left at Elliott. At Ballard, only Gene\u2019s and Ray\u2019s are still operating.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, it seems nothing stays the same very long. No matter how good we think the fishing is, it\u2019s really relative to what we are used to. I can only hope that 20 years from now we aren\u2019t saying, \u201cYou should have seen how great the fishing was back in the year 2016\u201d!<\/p>\n

Now the future of our salmon fishing industry has turned cloudy. There are groups of people that would like to shut down all salmon hatcheries in\u00a0Washington\u00a0State\u00a0thinking this would save wild salmon.<\/p>\n

Without hatcheries there would be no commercial or sport fishing or tribal fishing for that matter.<\/p>\n

A group called Wild Salmon Conservancy currently has pending law suits in the works against 69 salmon and steelhead hatcheries in our state.<\/p>\n

Some fish biologists believe that even if we spent a trillion dollars trying to save wild salmon there will be no wild salmon a 100 years from now south of\u00a0British Columbia.<\/p>\n

Our elected officials better get a handle on these nuts before our billion dollar fishing industry goes up in smoke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  EARL SANDE   By Earl Sande The history of how good salmon fishing was in\u00a0Puget Sound\u00a0can easily be forgotten…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sande","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2213"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2216,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213\/revisions\/2216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}