Salmon eyes

I fished Possession Bar again yesterday morning with my friend Dan Nomura.
We took his boat, a 19 foot seaswirl (I think). These boats are mainly pleasure boats, but Dan has it outfitted for fishing as well with GPS, two electric downriggers etc.
We drove to the Edmonds Marina and they "sling" your boat into the water there.





Once we in the water we had trouble getting the boat to start. Dan has two batteries tied into each other,(parallel) one of them he thinks is going bad, He went to his truck and was going to "borrow" the battery from it but instead the people that work at the Marina had a battery/engine starter. So off we went, worried that the electric downriggers would drain the batteries and we would have to kicker motor it back to the Marina later in the day... Gotta fish! You know!
We started fishing about 6:3o on the Eastern side of the Bar. There were about three to four hundred boats scattered all over the water. We saw lots of bait fish but not many nets out netting fish. The day started out calm and promising but it wasn't long and the rain began to pour and pour and pour... Imagine that!
Dan mentioned why not that many fish are caught in the rain is because of the Barometric pressure change, this change affects the fish for about a day, he said if it is raining the next day it shouldn't be as big a problem as the fish have acclimated a bit.
Anyway, I caught about 6 dawg fish, we eventually moved over to the West side of the bar but still no fish caught nor did we get any real strikes. There were boats everywhere, it was almost as bad as Lake Washington on opening day of Sockeye season.
Dan wanted to go to Point No Point and mooch, so that is what we did. I haven't mooched in years so was not fluent in the technique, so that must be why on the first "let down" to the bottom of the sound my bait I got a solid strike. I thought of course that it was another dawgfish, but much to my surprise and delight... it was a nice 12 pound Blackmouth with adipose fin removed, in other words a keeper!


We went thru many more dawgfish using this mooching technique, dawgfish destroy your line and you must replace your lures almost every time you catch one, which is just about every time you let your line down. Since it was raining so hard and the chop was picking up, this was a real pain in the %^$, by this time I was soaked, I didn't bring any rain gear and Dans' boat has no overhead covering, my fingers had water ripples... I am beginning to really fall in love with my boat!
Dan caught a nice blackmouth of about 15 pounds but we had to release it because it was a "wild" one.
We finally gave up and headed home. A long day, fun and interesting, and stink in the boat!