Lock-jawed kings can hold up on the bottom in deep frog water, and refuse every offer pulled across their noses.

Hover fishing can mean the difference between coming up empty and catching lunkers. Photo by Terry W. Sheely.

Typically, frog-water salmon are a bad but all-too-common scenario.

Unless you're resourceful river guide Jerry Brown. Specializing in salmon and steelhead, Brown runs into his share of frog-water skulkers, but he's found a technique that will predictably provoke enough of those monstrous jaws into opening for his thin-wire 2/0 hook for his clients to have a good day on bad water.

He calls it "hover fishing," a name that accurately describes the technique of boat-fishermen "hovering" over deep pools above skulking kings (and coho and every so often a steelhead, too) while presenting a scent-oozing golf-ball sized clump of dyed salmon eggs sweetened with sardine smack into the faces of these lurking giants. Even the most insolent chinook can tolerate only so much of this temptation before opening up and crunching the succulent annoyance.

"Patience," Brown emphasizes, "Patience is the key."

That, a strong battery and the right terminal rig.

Springers are the most coveted of the fall, summer and spring chinook cousins, but like all big fish, they prefer the easy route to their spawning destiny; a route that leads away from strong currents, through deep sullen runs and slack-water pools -- two of the most frustrating and difficult places to fish with typical river techniques.

Hover fishing, though, is anything but typical.

It's a technique that steals small bits from long-proven salmon techniques like back-bouncing, float-jigging, plunking and drifting and blends those parts into one rig specifically created to unlock lock-jawed kings in impossibly difficult slack-water situations.

It's so successful that hover fishing is now a standard rig in the bag of tricks that Brown and other salmon guides depend on for producing chinook in the lower Lewis, Cowlitz, Willamette and other Washington-Oregon king salmon rivers with the requisite water conditions.

It works best in so-called "holding water," where the bottom is a minimum of 10 feet deep, and the current is so slow that it's negligible. "Slow, slow water," Brown explains, "this is where you'll find big schools of springers staging up, holding before moving on upriver. These are the salmon that are notoriously toughest to get to bite, and it's perfect water for hover fishing."

Line control is critical to the presentation, and Brown favors bait-casting reels that allow him to position and hold his baits at exactly the right depth, which is just 2 to 4 inches off the bottom -- eye level with skulking chinook.

The tackle he's put together for this technique is built around a medium-action steelhead rod, and a conventional bait-casting reel loaded with 25-pound-test mainline. A barrel swivel is attached to the end of the line, below an Easy Slider. A 10-inch-long dropper is knotted to the terminal swivel and tied into the appropriate size lead ball weight.

To the Easy Slider, Brown knots on from 4 to 6 feet of 10- to 12-pound-test monofilament leader. "These are big fish, which tempts some guys to use heavy 30-pound leaders," Brown says, "but that's a mistake, I think. Because the heavier leader has a thicker diameter, it tends to catch more current and will pull, or kite, the baits up out of the strike zone. Twelve-pound-test is plenty strong enough to handle a springer, especially when you have a boat to chase it. Because the line diameter is half the size of the heavy leader, it doesn't kite out of the strike zone."

To the 4 feet of leader, Brown attaches a 2/0 Owner's or Vision ultra-thin wire hook. The thin wire penetrates easily into the jaw of a lazy king while it's holding in position, crunch-munching the bait, requiring little if any hook-setting rod action.

The egg loop in the hook is packed with a super-sized cluster of salmon eggs. "Typically, when hover fishing, I use golf-ball-sized clusters, but sometimes I'll have to give them a bunch of bait -- something that resembles a tennis ball," Brown notes.

He sweetens the bait with natural and artificial scents and "because you never know what flavor they want today," he carries an array of artificial scents that can range from shrimp to night crawlers, anise to blueberry.