The northern rivers of British Columbia — the Nass, Skeena and Kitimat — support runs of coho salmon that have attracted anglers for many years. Coho are a favourite target of fly-fishers in freshwater as they willingly take flies even though they’ve stopped feeding. On the ocean, commercial and recreational fishermen troll for them with plugs, spoons, jigs and bait, and recently, fly-fishers have begun targetting coho in the open ocean, using baitfish and squid imitations. I’ve caught lots of coho on flies in northern rivers before, but I liked the idea of fishing for them in the open ocean, where they would still be actively feeding.

Anglers wanting to experiment with fly-fishing for coho in northern waters could not do better than focusing on the islands around Prince Rupert. The Chatham Sound area includes Wales, Zayas, Dundas Island and Melville to the north of Rupert, and Stephens, Prescott and Porcher to the south. Although coho are present in May and June, the prime time is from mid-July to late September. After speaking to a number of guides about run timing, I booked a day at the end of July to try my hand at fly-fishing for coho in Chatham Sound.

Millions of salmon feed along the Pacific coastline as they make their way back to the rivers where they originated. Chinook, coho, chum, sockeye and pinks feed voraciously in the ocean on sand lance (called needlefish in BC), herring, anchovies and even small salmon fry, storing as much energy as they can in their last meal before entering freshwater to spawn. We were planning to intercept these feeding salmon as they swung by the islands on their way to the Portland Inlet and the Nass River north of Prince Rupert or to the Skeena south of town. They would travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs in the gravel from which they had emerged.

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