Project Bottlenose continues as we fish to sample, tag, and release little chinook salmon in their first winter at sea. The idea is to fill a knowledge gap about where the young chinooks rear in winter, where they travel to and from, and where the bottlenecks are in their survival .
We are using small spoons and flashers that are made for trout or kokanee, and stacking them on the downrigger line , usually six per side, and 12 hooks in total. ( I made a post about this, with photos, back in October 2020 . ) The little chinooks often cough up herring that are much bigger than our lure .
We also catch some larger chinooks in their second winter , and occasionally a 3 year old , but the big ones get away .
We had clear but very cold weather before Christmas , and we found a concentration of the target fish in the north edge of Georgia Strait .
Then the snow came . We didn't get out for a while during the snow time .
