Fishing forecast for Seattle, WA

Puget Sound is a glacially carved fjord system — deep, cold, and connected to the Pacific through a single strait. Seattle sits between it and Lake Washington, and the ship canal between them carries salmon from salt to fresh past a lock in the middle of the city, which is as literal a view of a migration as anywhere in the country.

Best fishing times in Seattle this week

Majors run an hour either side of the moon crossing the meridian over Seattle, WA; minors, half an hour either side of moonrise and moonset. Where those widths come from: best fishing times and how we compute these times.

When these windows are not the right tool

Solunar theory is John Alden Knight's 1926 prediction; the ±60 and ±30 minute widths are convention, not calculation. The times are computed astronomy, the claim that fish feed inside them is not. The day rating follows moon phase — identical nationwide, so every city shows it the same. A moving front beats the moon: apps that read pressure.

Tides in Seattle

Moving water sets the hour here. The NOAA gauge 1.1 km from the middle of Seattle publishes 37 harmonic constants. Mean range is 7.7 ft, and the form factor — diurnal constituents over semidiurnal — is 0.97, which is mixed, mainly semidiurnal water.

Where to fish in Seattle

This page is built around Puget Sound, with Lake Washington in reach — both salt and fresh water, about 10 minutes from the middle of Seattle.

Puget Sound is a fjord, not a bay: depths exceed six hundred feet in places within sight of the city. Cold deep water this close to shore is what allows salmon and lingcod to be caught from a small boat here.

Coho are the most accessible salmon for a shore or small-boat angler here, and the run peaks from late August into October. Chinook are earlier and generally deeper.

The Ballard Locks are the only connection between the sound and the lake, and every boat and every fish uses them. Small-boat access to salt water inside the city runs through one gate.

The BNSF main line runs along the foot of the bluff for the whole northern shoreline of the city, pinned between the road above and the water below. Beach access exists only where a park carries a bridge over the tracks, as Carkeek and Golden Gardens do — and the mile and a half of sand between those two parks is walkable only around low water.

The Duwamish is the only river inside the city, and its lower waterway is a federal Superfund site under long-running cleanup. State health advice draws a hard line between fish that live there year round — perch, sole, flounder, crab — and salmon that are only passing through on migration. Read the advisory before keeping anything.

Range and current are not the same thing here. NOAA predicts a knot and a half at most off West Point and about a knot off Alki, while the same tide runs to six knots through the Tacoma Narrows twenty-five miles south. The eleven-foot swing in front of the city moves a lot of water slowly, and the places worth timing are the constrictions.

The nearest grids we publish are Portland, OR (234 km, Columbia River) and Anchorage, AK (2309 km, Ship Creek). Different water, and different minutes.

What you can catch in Seattle

State listings put these 6 fish in the water around Seattle. Plan around the peak, not the open season.

The Ballard Locks connect salt water to Lake Washington, and the fish ladder alongside them has a public viewing window. Migrating salmon can be watched passing through the middle of a city of four million.

Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish are large warm-water lakes inside the metro holding largemouth and smallmouth. Freshwater bass fishing twenty minutes from a saltwater salmon fishery is an unusual combination.

Sea-run cutthroat cruise the beaches of the sound year round and are caught from shore on light tackle. They are the most accessible saltwater fish here and are almost entirely catch-and-release by rule.

Pink salmon live exactly two years, so Puget Sound gets them in odd-numbered years and all but skips the even ones. They come through in numbers from mid-July into early September, close to shore and small enough for light tackle. It is the one run here where which year it is matters as much as which month.

Squid are a cold-weather fishery here, jigged at night from lit public piers with no boat involved. They feed after dark and come to light, so the productive hours are set by the pier lamps and the tide rather than by sunrise — the one local fishery that improves as the days get shorter.

Blackmouth is the local name for winter chinook — immature fish with a dark gumline, mostly delay-released hatchery salmon that never leave Puget Sound or the Strait, living on herring and sand lance. They hold deep along the drop-offs, and the old Seattle method is mooching: engine off, cut-plug herring, drifting on the tide.

Tackle sits outside a forecast page: start with how to catch largemouth bass.

Water temperature and season in Seattle

Air here swings 25.3 °F across the year, from 41.8 °F in December to 67.1 °F in August. No gauge measures water temperature here, so the chart below is air only.

Monthly climate for Seattle, WA. The air line is the NOAA NCEI climate normal for 1991–2020 — the thirty-year average of a calendar month, not the weather of any one year — measured at SEATTLE SAND PT WSFO, WA US (USW00094290), 10.2 km from the middle of town, with 28–30 of the thirty years behind each month. No gauge measures water temperature here, so this chart is air only. Water lags air by weeks and the lag grows with depth — a deep reservoir turns later than a shallow bay — so air is never a stand-in for a thermometer in the water. Read into this site on 2026-08-13.

Elliott Bay's gauge reports tides but not temperature, so this table is air only — and even the air lags here, peaking in August rather than July. The lake and the sound answer that curve differently: Lake Washington climbs into the band where bass spawn, months later than a Texas reservoir does, while Puget Sound never gets there at all. A shallow lake follows air; a fjord barely does.

Sunrise, sunset and daylight in Seattle

The moon window moves daily; the sun does not. Plan a season against this block.

The longest day of 2026 is June 21, 15h 59m; the shortest, December 21, 8h 26m. The meridian passing drifts about 50 minutes later daily: a dawn window this week is an afternoon window in a fortnight.

Salmon seasons in Puget Sound are set annually, area by area, and change materially between years. This page links to the state agency rather than restating anything, because a season quoted here would be wrong within a year.

Seattle is at 47 degrees north and the daylight swing is close to eight hours between solstices — the second-largest in this grid after Anchorage. The June evening runs past nine; the December afternoon ends before half past four.

Puget Sound water stays inside a narrow band all year — cold in absolute terms, but close to the same in February and August — so fish here move on migration and river flow rather than on thermal cues. Winter is not so much cold as dark.

At the summer solstice the sun here drops only about nineteen degrees below the horizon at its lowest — barely past the eighteen-degree mark that defines full astronomical darkness. Seattle gets under two hours of true night in late June, against roughly three in Portland and more than four in Chicago, and the northern sky holds a glow straight through.

The Olympics throw a rain shadow over the water northwest of the city. The Dungeness valley around Sequim is the driest place in western Washington on under twenty inches a year, against Seattle's high thirties, while the west side of the same mountains takes more than a hundred. A washed-out day in town can be a dry one sixty miles northwest.

Low water and daylight are locked in phase here. The deepest lows come near midday from spring into midsummer and near midnight through the dark half of the year — WDFW's Seattle daylight low-tide table runs only February through September, and still prints 'no daylight low' on many days inside it.

License and seasons in Washington

Rules for Washington come from Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, and the calculation behind the table is set out in how we compute these times.

Boat ramps and fishing access in Seattle

Public registries put 68 access points within reach of Seattle, 20 of them trailer ramps. The nearest is South Lake Union Park Boat Launch, about 1.2 mi out in a straight line.

68 access points within 25 km of Seattle, WA, from the agency registry and OpenStreetMap — the same records the table below lists. Each dot is a record its source publishes, not a place we have visited; click one for what that source says. The dashed ring is that 25 km circle, centred on the point every distance is measured from — click that centre for its coordinates, even when a cluster sits on it. Zoom in to split a cluster.