Beach fishing for salmon in the Oak Harbor area is still a no go and reports received this week indicate the fish remain out in the deeper water.

“There seem to be a lot of fish out in the straits, quite a few have been caught in the Neah Bay area in that portion of the strait,” Kevin Petersen from Oak Harbor’s Ace Hardware reported on Wednesday afternoon. “There are a lot of silver salmon right now.”

Petersen said the salmon in the bay are on the large size. “Basically they are staging in the area and feeding on candle fish and herring. There are lots and lots of bait fish out there right now and they are gorging themselves on them.”

As long as there are large schools of bait fish in deeper water, the salmon will not be returning.

“The salmon will not be coming back to their home waters until there is some rain,” Petersen said. “It’s kind of a self-preservation thing. They are not going to be coming back to the rivers until there is enough water to protect them. They want to smell that fresh, home river that they left.”

What local fishermen don’t want is three or four days of aggressive rain which will cause the fish the fish to blow right by and go straight to the rivers.

“The ideal thing would be to have just a little rain which would cause the fish to stage here,” Petersen said.

Oak Harbor sportsman Ron Kaser said about 40 percent of the Neah Bay salmon are hatchery raised and the ones that have been caught are averaging around 10 pounds.

“Things have been real slow around Oak Harbor, even up in Canada they aren’t catching anything,” he said. “The salmon are late returning this year and they have just started coming in up north in Nookta Sound.”

“Hinebank has been outstanding and the very top corner of Eastern Bank is also open,” Petersen said. “Not a single silver I know of has been caught out there, its only chinook. Every time I go there I get my 10 to 15-pound chinook. There’s lots of kings out there. Fishing out there is very, very good. Everyone is saying the fish are late this year.”

There are a lot of fish that have been reported jumping in the Fort Casey area, but these are sockeye.

“They won’t hit buzz bombs they feed on krill and stuff like that,” Petersen said.

Kaser said Lake Washington has been opened for an additional four days through Sunday, Aug.20.

“The limit is four fish per person per day. A friend of mine told there were something like 14,000 fish going through the locks every day,” he said. “There was an estimated 75-100 thousand fish total, all of them sockeye.”