Ucluelet Fishing Report: Season Recap 2011

Season Recap 2011

Ucluelet Chinook(King) fishing was excellent this past summer as was forecasted. The peak Chinook(King) fishing changes a little every summer because the timing of the runs varies every year. Ocean temperature, amount of feed along return path and pressure changes all have an impact on the arrival of the large returning fish. Ucluelet is unique in that there are usually many feeder Chinook salmon ranging from 10-20lbs that frequent the area as well. However, most fishermen want the larger fish as there is more meat and a bigger fight! This past summer we had great Chinook salmon fishing starting in March and this continued into early September. There were plenty of pilchards around starting in early July. 20-30 lb Chinook started early July and increased as the month went on. As fisherman, most of us enjoy using Tomic Plugs or Tomic Spoons to catch the larger fish, so this was a nice treat to start this early in July. The Starfish started producing in early August and the Wreck started producing mid August. We thought 2010 was a very good year, however our average weight per day increased for 2011.

Coho salmon fishing started in early July as well and numbers increased by mid-July. Coho stayed around until early September. We consider Coho a nice bonus as we are usually there for the Chinook. On many days if we used smaller gear we would spend much of the time shaking Coho off. (Not the worst problem to have!)

Halibut fishing started in May and was pretty consistent until early August when it slowed down. It picked up again around Mid-August while fishing around the Wreck. We should note that sometimes the Halibut are just out 20 miles and if the salmon are in around 7-10 miles we may not have time to run for them.

Weather: Great weather accompanied great fishing most days and we got to enjoy low winds and great fishing. Ucluelet is unique in that we don’t get the winds that happen north and south of the region, but 2011 was exceptional as there was very little fog during August (we call it Fogust) and most days not much wind.

Overall fishing was very consistent and we averaged larger catch loads since the average size fish went up for 2011. This all matched our forecast for the year. We haven’t received the forecast for 2012, but this should happen soon.

Below are a few pictures from the season. You can see the full picture blog from the past three summers at: Full Picture Gallery and Blog