It is big spring time in Victoria. That's when the four to seven year old springs swim through our local waters in greatest numbers. Port Renfrew and the Nitinat Bar are the sites of the highest concentration. Even the Robertson Creek and Nitinat springs spill over as far as the Owen Point ledge in Port Renfrew.
Closer to town, Sheringham Point, Muir Creek and Otter Point concentrate the biggies on ebb times. However, it is the last two hours of the flood that is the time to fish from Sooke west to Port Renfrew. Creyke and Aldridge points can be good flood tide spots in the late afternoon. Then the end of the ebb becomes the better tide right through Victoria waters, around Oak Bay Flats and up Haro Strait.
Your No. 1 choice is to tow medium anchovies in wire-rigged Teaserheads of Purple Haze, Pearl, Glow Green, Cop Car, Bloody Nose and Army Truck, as your first choices. These feature size 4 trebles with a size 5 or 6 Octopus single behind. For local lure favourites, look at my book, Vancouver Island Fishing Guide, and for precisely drawn diagrams, my Maximum Salmon.
Treat your single action reel to new 30-pound mainline, ending in a snap with a ball bearing swivel. Popular flashers include the Betsy line, now and as summer progresses. Also Purple Haze and Glow Green. Good hootchies include the Teaserhead colours above and the Glow Below. The Road Runner size and style of spoon hits its best use in the summer, particularly in unpressured water. That's because they are large and don't always need a flasher, and because no matter what happens a spoon is always fishing. Add to the above colours with the Mongoose, pink/blue, the Kinetic Purple and the trusty Cop Car Glow (that means gold between the black and white scales). Trail a spoon on its own 60 feet from the transom for coho.
You will be fishing close to shore for the big springs as they cruise the bumps from 50 to 100 feet. That means that Constance Bank gets some fish on its 60 foot contour, too. The ebb side of Clover Point will build up lots of springs as there is a lot of water between it and the last previous point of land - the Breakwater. All the water between is essentially dead water. Springs just simply continue swimming to Clover where the ebb tide runs fast off the point, creating tidal structure where fish wait - on the west side - until the flood.
Do remember that size matters. Both Sidney and Oak Bay waters have a prevalence of needlefish. That means bait and spoon sizes are smaller - the Luhr Jensen spoons, commonly called Coyotes, come into use, in the same colours already suggested, as well as the most well known: half green, half glow. And in plastics, squirts are fished rather than hootchies. The J-49, Irish Mist, along with the coastwide hotties: Purple Haze and Jellyfish. Oak Bay's best waters are the Flats between Discovery Island and Trial Island, a vast flat expanse of mud where you troll within ten feet of the bottom.
In Sidney, the best squirts are the J-49, J-70, Mint Tulip, green and white and Army Truck. Try the 500 and 232 in plugs.
