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Originally Posted by Ray Zee
mostly for surf perch. also salmon when they are ready but not very common.
in puget sound searun cutthroat trout are still abundant and fun.
great clamming and crabbing. but the surf fishing sucks really compared to the east coast.
I think you'd be really disappointed if you fished out east again.
I remember when I grew up we were always warned to never go near that river. Pretty sure the pollution happened in late 70s early 80s so timeline fits. Also makes perfect sense it'd be good fishing before GE given remote location and the tributaries were great despite being super small.
And ocean fishing, can't speak for further south but it's basically dead up in Maine. The baitfish no longer come up into the sound where my family lives so that means no mackeral, blues or stripers. When I was a kid we used to catch stripers off the dock and if we took a dingy out past the rocks and into the main sound we could literally fill it up by jigging for mackeral bringing them up 4 at a time. Those days are long gone. I barely am up there anymore but always give fishing a shot when I am and haven't caught anything in years up there. Will always ask the neighbors and other people passing by in the boats will always slow down and inquire because they too are hoping the fish have come back. Hoping it's just isolated to that one sound though.
Not hard to see it go this way though. My grandfather used to be able to catch Pollack and flounder when he moved up there in the 60s and those are no more. But the stripers were gone for close to a decade before coming back in the late 90s. Having said that, when stripers came back the bluefish started petering out.
Fishing up in Maine each summer it was blues as a little kid and they were replaced by stripers as a teen. Mackeral were always around. Aboit the time I went to college even mackeral started slowing down.
My cousins still spend a lot of time up in Maine and don't even bring their rods anymore. They say the fishing is much better in Rhode island.