A friend came down from Bainbridge Island last week for his annual salmon trip out of Ilwaco, limiting Thursday, getting skunked Friday and limiting Saturday. We spent Sunday morning at my office mutually admiring each other’s collections of old salmon can labels, an obscure Northwest specialty right up there with logging paraphernalia. (His collection is 10 times better than mine.)

He fished out in the ocean, but there also were plenty of boats in the river around Astoria-Megler Bridge on Saturday. (Joe Megler was a major early salmon packer here and speaker of the house in the Washington Legislature.) We are at the start of Buoy 10 season, which builds toward Labor Day Weekend. When I first moved here, it was suggested a person could nearly walk from Cape Disappointment to Point Adams by jumping from one fishing boat to another as they jostled close to the Buoy 10 line. But Buoy 10 is primarily a hatchery coho fishery and they have yet to run at all — as I write this on Sunday afternoon, a grand total of three coho have been counted at Bonneville Dam. It will take some significant rainfall to start them inland.

Buoy 10 is semi-famous. Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts are among the celebrities who have supposedly been sighted before and after fishing trips over the years. (I was also recently reminded of Paul Newman’s friendly visit in the early 90s, though he didn’t fish here, far as I recall.)

I also noticed signs Saturday touting fresh tuna and saw a recent report that albacore and the bait fish they pursue have moved 40 miles closer to shore. Home canning tuna in the late summer and early fall is one of this area’s great folk traditions. We expect to have some coverage of the early tuna season either this week or next.

We’ll also have primary election news, mostly of interest this year because of the nine-way congressional race in which the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, no matter what political party they belong to. With 31%, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is assured a spot on the November ballot. But there were five Republican candidates. Incumbent U.S. Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler and avid Trump supporter Joe Kent are virtually tied at around 21.5% district-wide on Sunday. Late-arriving ballots in Clark County are expected to decide the matter Monday. It will be fascinating to see how it comes out.

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