On to the fishing portion of our 2017 Nanaimo fishing charters wrap up. As I mentioned in the last post the weather was tough last season doing Vancouver Island fishing charters. The fishing was great right off the bat on our early season runs in late April. For those locals in Nanaimo, there is no better time to get out Chinook fishing than during our early season runs in mid to late April. This is when our largest runs come through the area and is the best time for fishing charters on Vancouver Island. We had a great start with lots or chinook up to 20lbs on every trip out. This was one of the best early season runs we've seen in a long time so hopefully thats a good sign for those chinook stocks. Through the spring and summer we saw great Coho fishing that lasted well into the late summer. Lots of wild Coho with some hatchery ones out there and the sizes were great, up to 10 lbs which is big for the area. The chinook fishing for the rest of the season was up and down, some days we would get into a bunch and the next day only a few. Most of the runs were late arriving in the area and all over the west coast. The average size was down from previous seasons as well and this was not just our area, but up and down the coast. With the chinook fishing up and down we did alot of bottom fishing and was a good year for that. Almost all of our fishing charters were successful in hooking into some bottom fish including yelloweye, lingcod and other rockfish. The lingcod fishing was great, hooking into fish up to 30 lbs, with lots in the 15-25lb range. For those who don't know, our ling cod are actually prefered over halibut for taste, this is some of the best white meat you can get! And they put up a good fight as well! Later in the summer we started traveling further on our fishing charters on Vancouver Island. The bigger chinook had started coming into areas north of Nanaimo, so we traveled to Bellinas, French creek, and even Little Qualicum. We were able to get into some good sized chinook and some coho as well on most fishing charters late into September. Another upside to the season was the amount of whale sightings we had over the course of the spring and summer. This was the most we had seen of the Transient Killer whales in many years. Almost weekly we were able to see some killer whales and sometimes they were very close and would stick around for a while. This just goes to show you never know what the next day on the water will bring doing fishing charters. Looking forward to a great 2018 season, cya on the water!
Capt. Blake