Fishing on the Queets River

Fishing is always a fun family activity where you can bring home some good fresh food too if you’re lucky enough. We usually only fish at the height of the salmon runs when the first rains bring the fish upriver with the freshets. This is the best fishing that only occurs a couple days a year so you have to time it just right. Trout and other fishing can be done year-round, but we always try stocking up on salmon so we will have plenty to last us until the next season. We vacuum pack and freeze some of the brighter fish and the others get smoked, canned, and smoked and canned so they are shelf stable. Smoking and canning are covered more in other stories here and if you haven’t started home canning yet you really should think about starting it. We didn’t worry about food during the great 2020 Covid scare because we had plenty of great home canned food on the shelf so it didn’t matter if the stores were open or if the shelves were empty or not.

We usually only eat Sockeye or Sliver (Coho) fillets so those are the only ones we will vacuum pack and freeze. The King (Chinook) salmon we catch are usually smoked or canned only because we prefer the Sockeye and Silver flavors personally and we are blessed to live in an area where we can be picky about which fresh salmon we eat. We also cook the Sockeyes and Silvers the traditional way by staking them by a fire to cook which also imparts a light smoked flavor into the fish as it’s being cooked. I know that some fisherman out there somewhere is calling us picky right about now and the are right so I admit that.

This trip is on the Queets River on the Olympic Peninsula. The Queets River starts at Mount Olympus and flows into the Pacific Ocean at the village of Queets south of Forks. It is a clean river and we never have to worry about water quality of contaminants in the fish from the river itself. The river levels tend to rise and fall fast so timing the optimum fishing conditions is hard to do more than a few days out. There are trout and char in the river year-round so there is always something to fish for when conditions and the time are not right for the salmon. We fish on the Quinault Indian Reservation to avoid the crowds because fishing is closed there to the general public and we can fish it since my kids and I are all enrolled Quinault Indians.

Jessica and I were Hannah’s fishing guides for the trip. We will usually call a friend or two to see if they want to go, but generally it’s just the three of us plus my son on occasion. The salmon had been piling up towards the mouth of the river during the low water so we knew that fishing would be great any day as soon as the rains came back so we watched the forecasts and hoped the timing would be right. About 2 inches of rain was forecasted for that Friday with dry weather returning for the weekend so we decided to make a camping trip out of the fishing trip as well. Early season salmon tend to bite most heavily in the morning until the sunlight hits the water so that left us the afternoons to go quad riding and shooting. The bite will continue longer on cloudy days and you can still catch salmon with the sun on the water, but the action slows down greatly.

We use Blue Fox Vibrax and Flash-Glo spinner primarily in a wide array of fluorescent colors. Blues and pinks seemed to work the best for early salmon. We will also plunk with eggs and corkies to take a break from casting occasionally. The sockeye run was long since over so Silvers and Kings were the primary targets on this trip so the gear and techniques are different. Another major difference is that you cannot set the hook-on sockeye very hard as a hard set will pull the hook through their soft mouths and you’ll never keep one hooked and that is never a problem with the other salmon species. I used to be an Indian fishing guide so I learned lots of tricks over the years and we are still stocked up on tackle from those days so we only have to buy some of the newer latest and greatest gear on occasion to try.

I use a G Loomis custom made bait cast rod while Jessica and Hannah use Lamiglas rods with Pflueger spin cast reels. I primarily use Berkeley Big Game line in various weights for the fishing we intend to do. I used an Ambassador Six reel for over twenty years before it was finally too worn out to rebuild so I had to switch to the 6500. I can’t even venture to guess how many fish have been reeled in using that reel over the years, but it was lots.

We started fishing at first light and hooked several salmon that came off. We did land a few and Jessica caught a nice trout that we thought would make a great lunch snack so we kept it too. The fight is always the fun part and watching both of them fight the fish was very entertaining. We were fishing from the gravel bar so it was easy to pull the fish onto the gravel without needing a net or a hook. Hannah loves eating fish, but refuses to touch them for some reason so it’s up to Jessica and myself to take the hook out. We clean the fish at the river, usually by filleting them, so we don’t have a mess to deal with at home. We will save the eggs for future fishing trips if the fish was a hen. The best part of fishing there is that we are usually the only people on that whole stretch of the Queets River so it is very relaxing for us too. If you plan on going salmon fishing sometime, I would highly recommend hiring a guide or finding someone who knows a lot of the tricks and what holding water is the best fishing to help you learn how it’s done.