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First Sea Run Cuttie

1450 Views 18 Replies 12 Participants Last post by  Smalma
Caught my first SRC tonight and it was a whopper! Roughly 16". There were numerous coho jumping but they knew not to eat my fly.

Pretty stoked as it was on my list of things to do this year.


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Nice fish! I've yet to catch one that big.


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Nice! You're hooked now. Man, that thing is a sea lice condo. Not sure I've ever seen one so covered.
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I wanted to get it back in the water quickly or I would have taken a pic of his back. Even more covered in lice. This thing was a fighter. Ran on me a couple times.


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Nice! You're hooked now. Man, that thing is a sea lice condo. Not sure I've ever seen one so covered.
I think I am addicted to the SRC. I know they won't all be that big and I won't always catch fish. But, there are abundant places to fish in the Puget sound and I live close to the water...

Next weekend though, I'm on the Yakima!

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I think I am addicted to the SRC. I know they won't all be that big and I won't always catch fish. But, there are abundant places to fish in the Puget sound and I live close to the water...

Next weekend though, I'm on the Yakima!
Just being out and always looking to new beaches and new interactions. Really it's the flyfishing version of geocaching, you find a cache and keep going back hoping for a cool new trinket or travelbug ;)
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Nice!
Congrats on your first searun.

It must be the habitat in the area that searuns are living in that has something to do with the copepods on the fish.
Some areas I fish you hardly ever see them, while other areas almost every fish has them with some being quite heavily infested.
It also may have something to do with their life history and the amount of time they spend in the salt.
SF
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There may be something to that. Most of the heavily infested cutthroat I've caught have been in the south Sound and Hood Canal while I have only rarely caught heavily infested fish in the more northern and eastern parts of the Sound. Typically the south Sound and Hood Canal have a larger proportion of late-entry cutthroat (because of the preponderance of very small streams emptying directly into marine waters) which may spend as much as much as six months in saltwater, while the larger streams on the east side of the Puget Trough produce mostly early-entry cutthroat who rarely spend more than three months there.
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There may be something to that. Most of the heavily infested cutthroat I've caught have been in the south Sound and Hood Canal while I have only rarely caught heavily infested fish in the more northern and eastern parts of the Sound. Typically the south Sound and Hood Canal have a larger proportion of late-entry cutthroat (because of the preponderance of very small streams emptying directly into marine waters) which may spend as much as much as six months in saltwater, while the larger streams on the east side of the Puget Trough produce mostly early-entry cutthroat who rarely spend more than three months there.
For what it's worth, this was caught on the east side of PS and more middle to north end.
Beautiful fish, great sharing here.
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It looks like something may have been chewing on its dorsal fin.... that's odd.

He's looking at you with more than a little suspicion. Most likely never seen a human before. :)
It looks like something may have been chewing on its dorsal fin.... that's odd.

He's looking at you with more than a little suspicion. Most likely never seen a human before. :)
He's probably saying to himself "You gonna let me go or what?"
I wonder if one were to gently take those lice off, would it benefit the fish greatly? Or should we not meddle with nature?


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I wonder if one were to gently take those lice off, would it benefit the fish greatly? Or should we not meddle with nature?

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I would tend to err on the side of caution on not mess the nature more than we already do.
I wonder if one were to gently take those lice off, would it benefit the fish greatly? Or should we not meddle with nature?

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Once the fish hits freshwater to spawn, they won't be on it for much longer.
SF
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Yeah, the ones on me usually come off as soon as I get back in fresh water.
I wonder if water temperatures in the summer have something to do with infestation rates of those parasites on the cutthroat. It seems that in the last 30 years such infestations have become much more common in Port Susan (a north sound area). That increase seemed to follow the massive sediment input in the area from up river slides in the mid-1980s. The whole north end of the bay has become much shallower with massive sand areas exposed at low tide. Mid-day low tides result in significant water temperatures as the incoming tides flood those solar heated sand flats.

Curt
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