I can remember fishing for what we then called "feeder silvers" off
Possession Point in the spring with pop gear and worms, the limit in those
long-gone days was six fish under eighteen inches. As I have come to
understand it, resident silvers recapitulate the ocean-going silver's
migration in miniature. Under normal conditions, resident silvers migrate
north in the spring, out of the South Sound and into Admiralty Inlet and the
Strait of Juan de Fuca where they feed voraciously through the late spring
and summer. Maturing at the end of summer at two to five pounds, they
return to their natal streams to spawn. That six-fish bag limit back in the
'fifties went a long way toward nearly destroying the resident silver
population, and it was only the (fairly) recent discovery that smolts held
in pens beyond the normal migration time tended to residualize in Puget
Sound that enabled the WDFW and the tribes to begin to re-establish this
fishery. In some years, there is so much feed (euphausids and amphipods)
available in the South Sound that the migratory movement is reduced
substantially. Normally there is a good fishery for northward-migrating
resident silvers along the east side of the Sound (Lincoln Park for
instance) as well as through Agate Pass that can last from November to as
late as March or April. At this stage of their lives the fish usually run
from twelve to fifteen inches.
