Buoy 10 is a marker near the mouth of the Columbia, and it has quietly become the name for the whole month of August out there. Fall Chinook stage in the estuary before running up the river, they stack into a few miles of water where the flood tide pushes the salt in over the top of the fresh, and every trailer boat in two states knows it. On a good morning the fleet is a few hundred boats long, all trolling the same tide line at the same speed in the same direction, and from the deck it looks less like fishing than like a parking lot that decided to migrate.
It is a lot more orderly than it sounds. Everybody runs the same direction, everybody turns at roughly the same time, and the whole formation crawls up the river with the flood at about two knots over ground while the water underneath does something entirely different. That is the trick of the place, and it takes an hour to get your head around. You are moving upriver, your bait is moving downriver relative to the water, and the salmon are sitting in the current facing into it with the whole conveyor belt bringing them anchovies. Get the speed wrong by half a knot and you have a very expensive boat ride with attractive scenery.
The gear is unfashionable and effective. A cut-plug herring behind a flasher, a lead ball heavy enough to hurt if you drop it on your foot, and a rod in a holder that you are not allowed to touch. That last part is the rule everyone breaks. A Chinook does not slam a herring. It comes up behind it, chews on it for a while, and the rod tip does a couple of small polite nods that look exactly like the sinker ticking bottom. Grab the rod on the first nod and you take the bait away from a forty pound fish. The skipper we rode with had a piece of tape on the rod holder and told a green kid on the bow to keep both hands behind it and count to five out loud. The kid counted to four, grabbed, and got nothing but a shredded herring and a lesson.
Ours came at the top of the flood, right where the boats were bunching up worst. Two nods, then the tip went down and stayed down, and the fish just left, straight out across the wakes of four other boats. What followed was a fair amount of shouting between strangers, all of it good natured, as three skippers put their engines in neutral to let a fish that belonged to none of them run under their hulls. Twenty minutes later it came up on its side, a bright chrome hen a shade over thirty pounds with sea lice still on her, which is the estuary way of saying she had been in fresh water for about a day and a half.
We got one more before the tide quit and the fleet came apart, and then it was just boats going home in the fog with the bridge looming up out of it. The whole thing runs on cooperation between people who never introduce themselves. Somebody described it as the politest traffic jam in the Pacific Northwest, and nobody on board had a better description to offer.