Crazy Coho with Underwater Cameras [Campbell River, Jun 25th, 2024 - LONG version]

Ever wonder what it looks like down there? What are those marks on the sounder? I have...so I took advantage of the fact that I travel a lot for work and bought cheap GoPros on Kijiji across the country and build underwater camera housings to clip onto my downrigger lines. I've synced the underwater footage to cameras overlooking the deck of the boat and my depthsounder/chartplotter. Eyes in the water!
For the east coast of Vancouver Island, coho are the perfect target for underwater cameras. Most chinook fishing happens too deep where lighting is unfavorably dark for the cameras, and shallow mostly in the morning or late evening when the same darkness problem arises. The footage here is from the middle of the afternoon in the very well lit 100 to 125 foot depth range, even on a cloudy day.
I chose to run two large AP spoons, as they have lots of action which coho of course love, and even more importantly this day, are easily visible to the cameras. The spoons are on ~6 foot leaders, and clipped to the release clips about two feet above the mainline terminal spiral clips. so the action is mostly 8 to 10 feet in front of the camera. Water clarity was not the best, but pretty good.
Lots of action caught in the two hours that I ran the cameras. I trimmed out most footage with inactivity, and still have a 55 minute clip. If you find it boring, check the channel for a shorter version of this video with only the more active footage.
I had a blast playing these coho, all released. Only my ego was bruised with landing ratio...almost felt like sockeye fishing. But this day I was out for underwater footage, not meat in the cooler.
This is best watched on a large 4k screen. The underwater cameras were recording at 1080p 60fps (automatically less fps in lower light) and take up one quarter of the frame, so on a 4k screen you will get full resolution. Make sure to select 2160p from the UA-cam settings.
Enjoy!

[@vroddestroyer300]

Great presentation... Thanks!!!

[@davedunsterville6693]

Cool video thanks!!!

[@dougwilliams3276]

You need a 1st mate. I volunteer