2026-08-18 Shelter Cove & Salmon Fishing

My daughter Jennifer & my grandson Hayden are still in town, and they wanted to make another trip to Shelter Cove before they left town.

The Army Corp of Engineers has finished the project to replace the floating breakwater in my section of the harbor, so we had no problems leaving the harbor this morning. We pulled out about 9 AM.

Here is a map snippet from my Garmin InReach that shows our track out to Shelter Cove and back. On the way back we stopped to fish, and I'll show a separate map snippet for that later in this post.

It's about 27 nm to get out there, one way.

On the way out we passed by the downtown cruise ship docks. There were 4 big cruise ships in port today.

The USFS is currently working on a timber sale in the area of Shelter Cove and they have a large bunkhouse/barge tied up to the dock there that takes up all of one side and most of the front. That leaves only one spot open for temporary moorage for visiting boats like mine. There was no way to know if that one spot was open until we actually got to the dock.

Fortunately, when we got there just before noon, that one spot was open and we were able to tie up to the dock.

Once we got tied up we noticed that there were a lot of jelly fish around the dock, which we have never seen before.

After a quick lunch I deployed the raft and Hayden and I took it over to the salmon stream which is very nearby to the dock. He caught a bunch of Humpies (Pinks) there but I was too busy tending to the raft and releasing his fish to get any photos.

After we got back to the dock, as always when we are here, Hayden started catching "dock fish" right away from the dock. These "dock fish" are usually either Rock Cod or Bullheads (Irish Lords).

These all go back into the water, some of them to be caught again a little later on.

Jennifer & Hayden went out in the raft not to fish but to just look at all the fish jumping in front of the Humpy stream.

Later, after dinner, we walked over there by way of the trail, and Hayden caught several more Humpies.

After dinner Jennifer & I sat by the fire while Hayden continued to fish from the dock. He said schools of Humpies were cruising by the dock every now & then.

Sure enough, eventually he landed a Humpy right there from the dock.

We had a great night there on the dock.

It was a week day so the USFS workers that were working on the timber sale eventually got off work and returned to the barge/bunkhouse. They were cordial and we didn't get in their way and they didn't get in our way.

In the morning we packed up our gear and left the dock pretty early because we wanted to do some salmon trolling in the Mountain Point/Herring Cove area.

Here's another map snippet from my Garmin InReach that shows more detail about our trolling for salmon. I usually start by Herring Cove and work my way up towards Mountain Point. But this time we kept hitting fish in the Herring Cove area, so we really didn't leave that area all day.

The InReach logs a waypoint every 10 minutes when we're moving. We started trolling around 10:30 AM and pulled the gear at about 3:15 PM. This shows our track during that time period.

The first fish we hit was a nice bright Pink. I usually keep them when they are caught out in salt water, so this one went into the cooler.

It was pretty active fishing with 2 Silvers caught, a couple lost, and a few times the downrigger popped as if there was a fish on, but we never saw a fish. In the end we went home with the one Pink and two nice fat Silvers.

Not a bad haul for a few hours of trolling 2 lines.

We got back into the slip at about 4:15 PM after a pretty successful trip.

Now I just have to teach Hayden how to fillet salmon so I don't have to do it anymore!