Salmon Fishing in the Northwest / Published by Auspicious Concierge

When I was a kid the highlight of my summer was going salmon fishing with my older brother and cousin Alvin. At the time I lived in rural Oregon and we would drive about three hours to get to the Oregon coast.

We would always leave before daylight and look for a quaint little pancake house along the way to fuel up for an intense four hours of battling Coho and Sockeye salmon. For some odd reason the fish would almost never bite after about 12:00 noon.

We would travel along the coastal highway through Salem, which is the capital city of Oregon, and take the Tillamook exit. Yes, Tillamook, where they make all that famous, delicious cheese!

But, our fishing spot was actually located just outside a sleepy little town called Garibaldi. Our favorite spot was called “The Ghost Hole.” It was supposed to a haunted inlet from the Pacific Ocean the legend dated back several hundred years and the locals avoided it like the plague. I never saw anyone else ever fishing there so it was a prime place to catch huge salmon.

We never saw any spooks, just huge salmon and lots of Sturgeon which we caught on occasion as well. The general rule of thumb with sturgeon however was under three feet or over six feet had to be released because they were juveniles and old timers.

The ghost hole was a horseshoe shaped inlet that was about a half of a mile in length and very deep. The fish would swim from the ocean and hang out there for some reason. And we were very happy about that because the fishing was fantastic. We never went out in a boat, we just fished from the shore.

Salmon are very intelligent and not easy to land. To start with they are huge and strong, and when you hook one they fight like no other fish in the world with the exception of a marlin. They break the surface of the water, sometimes as high as three feet. They twist and shake with such power and determination, its breathtaking to watch.

Their strategy of course is to break your line, and until we learned from our mistakes and started using thicker test line we lost a few beauties. I once stupidly brought a trout pole with very thin line and a big ornery salmon snapped my pole clean. I was the object of much teasing over that one for quite a while.

It was very difficult to decide what bait to use because they were very fickle and what worked one day, didn’t necessarily work the next. We brought night crawlers of course, and we even had lots of success with cocktail shrimp as bait believe it or not! Alvin had some custom made lures that an old fellow custom made for him that worked the best of all.

We were not always successful at catching our salmon, sometimes we went home disappointed and very tired. Over the many years since that time I’ve been fishing in many different parts of the country, but have never seen more beautiful views with such pure unspoiled glory like the Oregon coast. It seems like a distant dream to be standing upon that pristine shore without rubbing shoulders with twenty others fishermen.

The Pacific Northwest is so clean and pure because of the relatively meager population and lack of factories and pollution that other states have to deal with. That was over twenty years ago, but things have not changed very much. I would one day like to return to the “Old Ghost Hole” and try my luck once again.