WILD BLOG: The Great (failed) Glow-In-The-Dark Corkie Experiment
POSTED April 5, 2009 / 4:30 p.m.

Back in the late 1980s, while still in middle school, my buddy Travis and I read an article in Salmon Trout Steelheader about using glow-in-the-dark Corkies. We couldn't wait to try.

The glowing drift bobbers had been around for years - I even had some in that old beat-up tackle box I used to haul around everywhere I went when I was a kid - but I hadn't tried them.

The theory was salmon holding in tidewater pools early in the morning, while it was still pretty much dark, would attack the lit-up ball of foam and plastic as it drifted past them.

Travis and I knew the perfect spot to try them. About three miles up the Chetco River, in our hometown of Brookings, was a hole known as the pump hole. It's the site of the old city water tower. Near the upper reach of the tide, hundreds of salmon stack up there each fall during low water, waiting for the first significant rain. The hole can get crowded, especially on a Saturday morning, but the fishing was generally good for the first couple hours of legal fishing time.

Travis and I, both around 13 or 14 at the time, had our parents drop us off early - 4 o'clock in the morning early - so we'd be the first ones there. As soon as it was that magical hour before sunrise, the first moment you can wet a line, we'd have those glow-in-the-dark Corkies with a sand shrimp and gob of roe bouncing through the pool of swirling salmon. But legal fishing time was a good two hours away. And typical of Brookings in early November, it was cold, wet, windy and dark.

If you haven't experienced the first storm of the season on the Southern Oregon Coast, you don't know what rain is. It comes down in buckets. And there is no break.

Long before the days of online stream gauges, we had no idea how high the water was and if that first big rain was going to ruin our chances at tidewater salmon. We didn't even have a flashlight to take a peek of the water.

Not having the flashlight proved to be the biggest downfall of our glowing Corky experiment.

We didn't realize it until around 6 a.m., two miserable hours after we arrived, that those Corkies we couldn't wait to try weren't going to be glowing without being charged with a bright light first. I tried the light from my watch with no luck. Travis thought about sneaking into the back yard of a nearby house and holding them up to their porch light. Then we heard the slam of a car door and the crunching gravel as anglers began walking down from the road. Soon we stood there, shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else, trying to catch one of the Chetco's prized king salmon.

We were already soaked, our Corkies weren't glowing, and the fish weren't biting, probably because the Chetco had gone from low and clear that Friday night to big and brown that Saturday morning after four inches of rain since midnight.

“Don't worry,” I told Travis. “Did you read that article on fishing those new lures called “Kwikfish” with sardine chunks? We'll have to give that a try.”
-AM