Downriggers are especially effective at taking baits and lures down to where big Chinook salmon are often found. Photo by Terry Rudnick

Salmon were hugging the bottom, no doubt about it. Depthsounders sometimes mislead, but they seldom lie, and ours was showing plenty of fish in the lower 10 to 15 feet of the water column and only an occasional mark above that. The fish we were hooking and landing told the same story. We had a pair of 6- to 7-pound Chinook in the fish box and had released three or four smaller ones, and all bore the scrapes and scratches along the sides of their heads that indicated they had been rooting in the sand and gravel to feed on candlefish.

Acting on that evidence, fishing partner Clyde Revord and I were doing things the same way as anglers in a half-dozen other boats around us: slow-trolling fresh herring baits 20 to 30 feet behind downrigger balls that were all but bouncing along the bottom.

Friends in a nearby boat hooked what appeared to be a large fish, so we raised our rigs a couple of feet, shifted the motor out of gear and coasted past them, shooting several photos of their success from a few yards away.

As Clyde stepped back to kick the motor into gear, he let out a yell, and I turned to see my trolling rod bucking up and down wildly in the rod holder. My line had already released from the downrigger gear, and the reel started chattering like a berserk squirrel. Something powerful was headed for parts unknown.

I dropped my camera, wrestled the rod out of the holder and hung on as the fish peeled nearly 100 yards of line off the reel in its first run, then rolled on the surface for several seconds in a nearly successful attempt to give me a heart attack. We could see then that it was a Chinook much larger than the two we had in the box, but it was at least 10 minutes more before we coaxed it close enough to net, swung it aboard, and admired the 16-pounder. It may not have been a trophy, but the big salmon was enough to take bragging rights for that day among the group I was fishing with, and that was good enough for me.

The downrigger has, over the past 30 years or so, become one of the most important tools of all among West Coast salmon anglers. It allows them to fish baits and lures at greater depths, more easily, than any method developed before or since its arrival on the salmon scene. Besides allowing anglers to troll as deep as they want, downriggers also provide a sort of trolling "accuracy" at all depths that can be every bit as important to fishing success. Its effectiveness and ease of use are why you see 'riggers on tens of thousands of recreational salmon boats from the central California coast to the Bering Sea.

Some of those salmon anglers, though, get to know their downrigger's abilities and use them to their advantage much better than other anglers do. It needn't be so.

The downrigger is really a very simple machine based on a simple principle. It's a large spool connected to a boom with a pulley or roller on the end. The spool is loaded with 200 to 400 feet of wire, and at the end of the wire is a 10- to 15-pound weight. Attach a fishing line to the wire by means of a release device and send it down to any depth you desire. When a fish strikes, the line pulls away from the release and you have a direct connection to your fish without any cumbersome weight between you and that streak of silver at the end of your line.