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The Art of Mooching: Simple and effective technique steeped in lore of Puget Sound
By GREG JOHNSTON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
The glory days of Puget Sound salmon fishing exist today only in the memories of old-timers.
Most of the 152 boathouses and resorts at its peak in the 1950s are gone or nothing more than crumbling pilings dotting the shore.
Gone are dozens of coffee-stained counters that enclosed an assortment of hooks, lines, lures, swivels and pictures of huge chinook and grinning anglers.
Gone are the wooden walls covered with finger-smudged marine charts.
Few are the places now where the salty breeze carries that peculiar collection of odors from herring bait, gas pumps and mudflats.
But one tradition from that era still endures: a salmon fishing technique known as "mooching," invented on Elliott Bay near the turn of the century.
Effective and exceedingly simple, yet difficult to master, the tackle involves only a 2- to 8-ounce sinker, a swivel and one or two hooks. Bait is usually a herring, cut and/or rigged on the hook so it spins as if it's crippled when moved through the water.
"It's the most personal way to catch a salmon, I think," says Frank Haw of Olympia, a former state fish biologist and one of the top salmon anglers in Washington. "It is less mechanical than other methods. You feel the salmon playing with the bait."
A serious moocher disdains trolling with heavy tackle or downriggers. The moocher attempts to duplicate what occurs in the world of a salmon in as natural a way as possible: using what the salmon eats, rigged in a way that imitates the movement of a herring when it is hit and wounded by a salmon.
"Simply stated, it's you and the fish without any high-tech involvement," says Jim Bates of Bellevue, a King County Municipal Court judge whose father taught him to mooch 40 years ago.
"To do it right, you don't crack a beer and put your rod in the holder. It requires sensitivity, the power of observation and quick reflexes," he says.
Arguably the most sporting method to catch chinook -- which usually run so deep that fly-fishing is difficult -- the satisfaction in mooching is that it allows the angler to participate in the ecological process of the sea.
To get the bait down to the proper depth for chinook -- the prime quarry of Washington salmon anglers year-round -- you must drift or motor slowly with the current. You must watch your rod constantly for bites, as well as search for the arrival of seabirds. When auklets and murres begin diving underwater and gulls begin pouncing on the surface, they're feeding on schooling sand lances or herring, and that often means salmon doing the same below.
A salmon typically will slash through these "baitfish" schools, biting at any prey it can. It will then wheel around and chase down any it has wounded.
To resemble this wounded fish, the herring bait is rigged on the hook or hooks with its head kinked back, or with a traditional "plug cut," in which the head is sliced off with a beveled cut.
No one knows who first began "plugging" herring in this fashion.
Haw, who pioneered the old Department of Fisheries' Puget Sound chinook enhancement program and is a student of local angling lore, says it first became popular around 1910 on the shores of Elliott Bay -- then teeming with salmon.
"They did that from the docks, using gut lines and cane poles," Haw says. "They didn't refer to it as mooching, but talked about 'spinning.'"
Eventually, anglers began "spin-fishing" from anchored boats, using crescent-shaped sinkers to cast out and allow the bait to drop to the bottom with a fluttering spin. A variation popular until about the early '60s was to cut a "spinner," fileting a long, triangular strip from the side of a large herring, with skin left on and the leading edge beveled.
"The guys who really knew how to cut spinners were highly regarded, guys like Gus Zarkades and Bill the Greek," Haw says. "Both prided themselves on spinner fishing."
At some point, anglers began mooching with spinners, using whole and plug-cut herring fished behind boats rowed slowly, or, later, propelled by small outboard motors. How the term mooching originated is apparently lost with the ages.
"Many of the old Puget Sound moochers rowed. When I first started going up there in the late '50s, there were still rowboats for rent, some with double sets of oar locks, at places like Norma Beach Boathouse," Haw says.
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