California's beleaguered king salmon fishery has cracked open a longer 2026 ocean season, and Die Hard Fishing's Adam Irino has used the early-May window to file his first salmon trip of the year — a successful outing aboard a friend's brand-new boat that produced fish on the maiden voyage. The video posted just twelve hours before publication will be welcome news for an angling community that has watched the season collapse to nothing two years running.
"Last year we had an extremely limited season. I was lucky enough to get out and catch a few fish. Um the years before that we didn't have any season at all. This year we have a little bit more of a season," Irino said as he packed the truck the night before the trip, walking viewers through tackle on a kayak-friendly setup that doubles for boat work.
The 2026 season opened roughly two to three weeks before filming, although Irino noted the timing is no longer predictable. "Early on in the season, you know, in April when it used to open normally — now you never really know," he said. The early window historically pushes most of the salmon offshore, beyond reach of the kayak fishery that Die Hard Fishing's audience is built around, but the longer 2026 window gives anglers a real shot at the in-season inshore push.
Irino built his ocean tackle around two rods. The lighter outfit is a 9-foot medium-action salmon rod with a parabolic bend, run on either a diver or a downrigger and matched to the soft tip needed to ride the constant heave of a coastal swell. The heavier rod is an 8-foot setup with more backbone, used for the old-school sinker release method that charter boats still favour. The two-to-three-pound sinker pops free under load, leaving the angler clean to fight the fish — at the cost of feeding lead to the seabed every drop.
The terminal end keeps it simple. Irino runs a flasher or a triangle dodger to draw attention from a distance, with a crippled anchovy head pinned with a red nail behind it as the most common business-end on the California king fishery. He acknowledged a Vpex in watermelon as a reliable artificial alternative, and noted hoochies dragged behind a flasher remain a productive combination, but argued the rigged anchovy is the gold standard for most anglers running their first trip of the year.
The trip itself produced a fish on the very first reel-up. "Yeah, it's a fish. Yeah. Hell yeah. On the way up. Yeah," Irino said as a salmon hit the line while he was clearing it to check the bait. He estimated the fish at around 10 pounds. "First one of the season," he said as it came over the rail. "I'll take it."
The day was not without its frustrations. Irino spent much of the morning slapping the rod tip on the water trying to knock a brown jelly-like substance off the line — a recurring problem on this stretch of California coast in spring that builds up in the rod guides and stops the angler reeling. "It was getting so much that it was getting caught in the eyes and I wasn't able to reel," he said. "Serious problems out there. But, uh, yeah, just part of the challenge."
A second hookup later in the morning came unstuck after a slack-line moment, but the trip closed out as a clear win for the duo. Irino's takeaway for kayak anglers eyeing the same fishery is to wait for the salmon to push inshore as the season progresses, when the 2026 longer window should put fish in reach of the small-craft community for the first time in years.
For Californian fishers, the broader story is that the salmon are back — at least for one more spring.