I moved to Oregon in 1980. Learning how to fish for Salmon and Steelhead in Oregon took a lot of work. You have to have water in order to get the fish to return to the rivers from the Ocean. After a good rain the rivers are flowing and can the water can be very murkey or even muddy. You have to wait until the river drops and clears. You have to learn what the river height is for each river when the fishing is best. I actually kept a log book. Each river was best at a different height. There was a website that you could go to for river heights. When the water was at the right height on the river that you wanted to fish, you went fishing. My best catches; 38 lb Chinook Salmon and 19 lb Steelhead. Oregon also has Walleyes in the Columbia River. In 1980 Oregon thought that the Walleye was a garbage fish that would eat the small Salmon and Steel head so there was no limit on the Walleyes. The average Walleye was 9 lbs. They ran a net sample at the John Day Dam and they netted a 25 lb Walleye that matched the World Record weight.
As a kid I fished for Yellow Perch in Minnesota. We started with a worm bobber fishing to catch our first Perch. Then we cut out a strip from the belly of that Perch and used that for bait. The skin is tough so you can use that bait over and over while worms are eaten off. We did get in trouble though as we caught so many Perch that we had no more room on our stringers, Sooooo, we started putting the Perch into the screened box that grandpa had built on the end of his dock. How we supposed to know that the box was where he kept his minnows? Want to know how to seign minnows?
Mel Thayer wrote:
My wife caught her first sturgeon today on the Columbia River. This one is 44 inches and 22 lbs. Oregon Gives very few days for retention now and they give short notice when they come up. Today you had to land one between 44 inches and 50 inches to keep it so this one just sneaked into the boat. When I first started fishing for them the size limit was 36 inches to 72 inches and we could fish for them year around/
I remember being out one day on the Columbia by Dodson with my daughter. Everything we were catching was about two foot long and I bet we caught 40 about that size. Then I caught one that was less than 12 inches. My daughter wanted to pet the little baby. She reached over the side of the boat and just as she reached down to pet it, about an 8 foot long Sturgeon came up and actually hit my daughter in the hand. It scared her to death as she flew back up into the boat. She used every cuss word that I had ever heard in my life as she danced around the boat trying to keep her feet off of the floor and up into the air. I almost died laughing and asked her why she did not grab that one.