When fishing on the salt, cohos are perhaps the most accessible and accommodating of the salmon. They are found in huge schools, they are often in shallow and in my personal opinion, they are the most aggressive, so therefore the most easily caught. While I do find schools of coho off shore, venturing far from protected waters is hardly necessary. Many cohos are found tight to land, which is perfect when fishing from smaller boats. It also means that a shore bound angler has a chance of catching coho too.
In the feature article I mentioned that cohos will readily take a flasher hootchie combo, and they certainly will, but with a bunch of super sized silvery salmon in such shallow water, many more options become available. Of them, I’d have to say chucking spoons and bucktail jigs has to be one of my favourite of methods and, a close second is long lining anchovies in a teaser head. When it comes to chucking jigs and spoons, what I’m doing is hunting them. Quite often I’ll see cohos jumping, giving away their location. I’ll run the boat over to where they are and launch a cast at the rings. Quite often the salmon will still be around and will crush the hook the second it hits the water, so be ready. If I find the fish spooky, and shying away from the movement of the boat, I’ll attach a 4 ounce banana weight and to the end I’ll tie on a leader with an anchovy attached to a teaser head. Then I’ll long line this rig and send it out a hundred or more feet behind the boat and troll with a bit of pace so that anchovy is doing a tight flashy roll. For boat shy cohos, this is just the medicine, and I’ve caught a ton of them this way.
Something that can put a lot of bonus salmon in the boat is when I’m anchored and fishing for bottom fish. When there is a reasonable tidal current, I take that same anchovy rig and slowly pay line out line, letting the available current take the rig out and induce that fish appealing roll. I’ll send this rig a hundred or so feet out from the boat, and then I’ll slowly reel it back up. I cover a bunch of water this way and catch a lot of bonus salmon too.