The Samish is short-line fishing water

Anglers with muscle memories trained to big casts that still don't cover the breadth of fishable water, will likely feel frustrated here.

The Samish, like several other small Puget Sound salmon streams is short-line fishing water.

If you didn't need at lot of extra line for the mad dashes these powerful fish make, you could get by with as little as 50 feet of mono-filament on a reel.

With its fishable reaches sometimes no more than 40 feet wide, the Samish compels bait fishers to perform a montra of cast, mend, drift and retrieve with no more than 30 feet of line. And executing the sequence takes no more time then it does to say it.

Adding to the claustrophobic feeling are the steep-faced dikes with the waist-deep grass and brush. If you're in the water or perched on the dike, there's little to no room to maneuver nor any spare gravel bar down which to sidestep to lengthen your reel's run of line or to chase a fish.

Finesse fishers who use lithe rods, small reels and light leaders, more often then not, end up pointing the rod at a frantic, downstream-fleeing king and simply wait for the end of the line to snap off the reel.

When successful king fishers hook up with a fish in the lower Samish, they dig in their heels, reef back on a stout fishing rod and trust their 20-pound test leader and its knots.

The tried-and-true method of drifting eggs under a float is recognized by many anglers as the most effective legal tactic for chinook in freshwater.

In the Samish, it's best done on at the start of outgoing tides. It also requires patience and the skill to mend a short line.

Thumb-size cluster eggs cut from fresh or cured green-egg skeins is the bait of choice. Embed them in bait hooks (usually 2/0 or 3/0 octopus style) tied with egg loops to help grasp the cluster, keeping them from sliding off the hook.

CHANGES IN ANGLERSHIP

One of the unusual transitions occurring now is that many anglers are fishing through the tide change throughout the run.

It used to be that fishers, either drifting eggs under bobbers or casting spoons, would work the latter stage of a flood or incoming tide or the first half of the ebb or outgoing tide. Lower reaches would be vacated by both fish and fishers each time the river goes shallow.

Early-arriving chinook waiting to enter freshwater come in on each tidal surge staying in what's called the saltwater wedge, the briny water underlying the downstream-flowing freshwater. They're waiting for their bodies admentjust to the change in salt content before committing fully to freshwater.

Today's anglers now seem to be working all tide stages, even the lows (to slack) despite the fact that when the tide goes out the river's mud bottom has mere inches flowing over it. Only scour pockets at the bends have deeper slots in which fish might hold.

In past years it was interesting to see that at high tide the reach just above Bayview-Edison Road bridge would be all but abandoned. Anglers would wait for the full ebb and then wade into the channel there to crowd the fish over against the old piling wingwalls when they would be most vulnerable to the questionable technique of 'flossing'.

With the new stationary gear restriction in place for 2008, that practice may disappear and anglers will have to learn new legal ways to catch these kings.