A friend of mine was telling me that he's been catching a bunch of Atlantic salmon lately about 45 minutes from where we live, so I figured I'd go check it out today. We fished for four hours or so, I caught one fish, he caught 3 or 4. But the biggest two we caught were an absolute blast.

It was really slow fishing, but that one fish made it a great day. I tried jerkbaits for a while, but I had to cut off the trebles and use a single hook - that's the rule for this river. No luck, so I tied on a chartreuse Blue Fox inline spinner, #3. I was sure the fish was gonna get off because it was a single barbless hook and this thing was a tank. It took me a good 2 to 3 minutes to land her. First I felt the lure stop, and I knew it wasn't a rock, but it took a second to register that it was a fish until I saw her about 15 feet in front of me. She started thrashing around near the bank, then went deep, swam straight upstream and pulled drag (I was using 15 lb Power Pro) about 30 yards and there was no stopping her. I turned her, and she proceeded to thrash around some more on the surface, and then headed downstream for a little run. When all was said and done, she was 13 lbs of pure muscle - a really beautiful fish. I might be doing more salmon fishing than trout fishing this winter

This was my buddy's biggest fish today, a 12 lber. He got all of his on an 8 weight fly setup:

Any of you salmon fishermen have advice on what types of lures to use, or even baits?

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Those are beauties!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Really nice fish.

Thanks guys  

fishizzle - these are the same types of fish that were jumping around at Crystal lake that day. Let me know if you want to join me this weekend - I'm heading back to the river.

Wow!

Nice fish!

8-)

What river is that?

nice fish btw, I wish they still had big populations of Atlantics in the creek I fish.

Josh - it's just a little river in CT. The state stocked two rivers and two lakes with Atlantic salmon this year. Unfortunately, starting December 1st, you were allowed to keep them. The weekend after I caught this fish, I went back, and most of the fish were gone - I didn't see any of the fish I saw the weekend before. They would just sit there in the current and hang out. I caught a little 4 lber and that was it. People fished out the whole place all week. Sucks.

Lemony snickets that's a nice salmon, ya eat?  

No, I let it go. It's too much of a hassle to clean them, the meat's probably not that good anyway (stockies), and you couldn't keep them until December 1st.

They stocked adults there?

Yup. Apparently they stock about 500 salmon each year from 2 to 30 pounds. This year it was in two rivers and two lakes. They disappear after December 1st though when people start keeping them.

There are a lot of snaggers too, even though I'm pretty sure it's illegal, because a lot of these big fish just sit in shallow water and hang out.

If its a "put and take" mentality, its hard to discourage the snaggers.  If they stocked smolts in there, you could argue that CPR would yield better fish.  That's pretty much how they do it here, and many spring run rainbows are actually "wild" descendants of naturally reproducing stockies.  We don't get any Atlantics up here, as far as I know.  Just lakers, splake, 'bows, 'hos, browns, brookies, and kings.

Nice, nice fish, BTW.