64 Northwest Sportsman AUGUST 2019 | nwsportsmanmag.com
COLUMN
fishing pier here gets very crowded, so ex-
pect combat fishing and very little parking
spaces. You can carry down and launch
kayaks at the park too, a good way to get
away from others.
Just south of Dash Point is Browns
Point. It has a lot of bank access, but like
Dash very little parking and the park is
situated in a residential neighborhood.
A good idea would be to arrange to be
dropped off and picked up later by a
friend, loved one or even an Uber or Lyft.
The one thing that Browns offers is
good bank fishing for pinks throughout
the entire month of August. This is be-
cause it is a breakwater for fish returning to
the Puyallup. On the incoming tide the fish
will rest in the back currents and breaks to
the south; on the outgoing, walk over to
the north side of the point and catch the
same fish using the point to churn the wa-
ters as they flush out.
Commencement Bay opens in early Au-
gust and is a top producer for intercepting
fish that are staging to go up the Puyallup.(651) 207-5634
Mendota, MN
Raise and lower your topper with a push of a button!
Topper EZ Lift allows you to get large loads in your pickup without
removing your topper and also turns your truck into a pop-up camper!Be aware of tides as there is a large mud flat
and boats are known to get stuck and have
to wait out the low tide while others troll
by further out and get a good laugh. The
water here looks muddy and off color but
that is just the glacial silt floating on top of
the saltwater. Down where your gear is it is
clear, but using extra scent is a good idea to
entice a bite in the brackish water.OTHER TACOMA-AREA SPOTS include the
Slag Pile, Owens Beach and Clay Banks.
Trolling here at first light is a mainstay for
South Sound anglers and you can catch
pinks and coho near the surface. Drop the
downriggers to the bottom half of the wa-
ter column and you will be targeting most-
ly kings with a few coho mixed in.
An 11-inch Hot Spot Flasher with a
4-inch hoochie in army truck on a 25- to
30-inch leader is very popular here for
good reason: It seems that that combo
catches a lot of Chinook. But don’t over-
look cut-plug herring or helmeted herring
that have been brined overnight in Brine-n-Bite. In the past few years I have been
running an inline flasher off of my down-
rigger ball with the release 36 to 60 inches
(depending on which release I use) behind
the flasher. I then run either style of her-
ring bare, hooked into the clip, behind it all
about 5 feet. The best part of this setup is
that when I hook a fish there is no flasher
on the line to pull against me and I get to
fight just the salmon. My hookup-to-land-
ed ratio has also gone up.
If you don’t have downriggers or divers,
you can find a good place to mooch just off
of the Clay Banks near the rip from Point De-
fiance. Another top mooching area is Point
Evans on the incoming tide; drift towards
the bridges. Further south in Marine Area
13 you can mooch near Gibson Point on the
southeastern end of Fox Island, as well as the
famed Green Can off the Nisqually Delta.
To get away from the crowds, head
to the southwest end of Vashon Island to
Point Dalco. This is a Chinook area where
you need to be ready for the bite. It’s either
hot or cold; it seems some days you catch a