Springer Fishing

Hi all;

It has been a while since I put anything on here, so I thought I would put up something that I did recently with Kevin and a couple of friends from work. I was invited by one of my friends from work to go fishing for "Springers" (Spring Chinook) with him down on the Columbia River. We drove down on Thursday afternoon and spent the night in Clatskanie, OR. Early the next morning, we drove down to Vancouver, WA, launched the boat and proceeded to go fishing.

Here are the other three getting the bait ready for the day of fishing, and getting the poles ready. On the left is the boat owner, Doug. Gotta tell ya, he is a master fisherman, he knows what he is doing. Next is another driver, Dave. And then, on the right, is Kevin.

These are the two fish that were pulled into the boat. I got the one on the left and Kevin got the one on the right. When we were ready to start, Doug told us to drop our lines to the bottom. Before he had a chance to get his line in the water, my pole started bouncing real hard. Not really knowing what the bottom of the river was like, I asked Doug is that was the bottom causing the bouncing. He yelled that I had a fish on. Sure enough, I had a fish. About 1 minute after dropping the line, I had a fish. Guesstamite was around 11 to 12 pounds. At this rate, I figured we would only be on the water for a hour or two. Wrong!!!! It took about 2 hour or so for the other fish to be hooked and then pulled in by Kevin.

Here are the two of us holding our respective fish.

When we got home late Friday evening, we did the cleaning of our fish, bagged all the entrails and heads and stored them in the freezer to keep them from smelling. On Saturday, we proceeded to process the fish. They were cut up into steaks and then vacuum-sealed in bags and frozen.

We did have some of the steaks the following weekend, and I gotta tell ya, I don't think I have ever tasted better tasting fish. They were laid on foil with slices of lemon and onion on top, with a dash of lemon pepper sprinkled on top. Then the foil was sealed around them and baked in the oven till done. It was DELICOUS!!!!!!