Decided to hit the Chinook opener in areas 10 and 9, when I pulled into the Shilshole boat ramp area around 4:50AM there was already a line of trucks and trailers about 6-8 long waiting in the street. I parked across the street (hand launch boat for the win!) and was on the water around 5:15AM with a lot of friends

Mostly fished the area from the weather buoy off Richmond beach up north past the oil docks and to around the area 9/10 border near Edmonds, managed to lose my entire rig from the terminal tackle onward while fishing close to the bottom there on my first pass.... was fishing at around 125 in 140-145FOW, release popped, and I pulled up my bare braid... had been running 40lb braid and 30lb leader setup and rod never really loaded all that much so not sure what happened. Lost a nice pro-troll rainbow echip flasher and an ace hi fly. Slapped on gibbs no bananas flasher and a cop car coho killer for the next troll, hooked a dogfish at 130 feet, then again at 130 hooked into something bigger and felt the head shakes so I assume a Chinook. Got it within 25 feet according to my line counter reel but lost it before the surface.

On next troll, release popped but it was a blank so I let my rig drift to the surface while I reset my downrigger (manual downrigger so takes me some time). On drift to the surface I picked up a nice 16 inch clipped resident coho. Reset and resumed the troll, picked up a shaker and nothing else. By this point it was late in the morning (around 10AM) and the action seemed to have slowed down and boats were leaving the area. On next troll I got another resident coho, this time a wild 17 incher and decided to bonk it and call it a day since I would be out again on Saturday and could try for a Chinook then. In retrospect I should have tossed back the second coho and kept hunting for Chinook.

Saturday 7/27 repeated the same time, area and rig (far fewer boats at the ramp vs opener day FWIW) and only came up with two shakers and a dogfish... no takedowns, no coho, no chinook despite fishing 5:30AM to around 2:30PM. Marked a lot of fish and bait but seemed there was no bite.

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