Kayaks draw anglers to their quarry; sometimes quarry pulls back

One of my first columns after joining The Oregonian in 1981 erupted from my fingers after watching a spectacle unfold beneath the Sellwood Bridge during spring chinook season.

At about 11 a.m. on a weekday, a man in a white shirt and tie (his lunch break, he said later) got out of his car, parked on the old ferry ramp on the east end of the bridge. He lifted a small yellow kayak off the roof and, within a few minutes, launched himself into the river with a fishing rod and a net.

Sellwood fleet regulars knew him as "the bass plug," and, sure enough, about 20 minutes later he netted a salmon and made the paper.

At the time it was one of the quirkiest seat-of-the-pants' techniques I'd witnessed in a sport that spawns innovation.

Fast-forward three decades.

Over the past year, I've seen -- or heard of -- kayaks used to catch trout, bass, halibut, Dungeness crabs, lingcod, rockfish, salmon, steelhead and sturgeon (I heard of one over-sized sturgeon that

Source: OregonLive.com

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San Francisco Chronicle (press release) - Jan 01, 1970

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