If birds are not actively working, concentrate your efforts along the clean sides of rips or foam lines where conflicting currents come together, concentrating food. By trolling with the current, you will constantly be presenting your spoon to salmon from the front where it can easily be seen, rather than from behind where it can't. If the fish are stationary and you're trolling against the tide and not covering new water, your chances for intercepting them are diminished. If trolling estuary areas, or in Puget Sound and the tide is running strong between changes, look for salmon off points, in back eddy areas and troll zig-zag patterns because trolling with the tide is usually just too fast to be productive in this situation. How and what a salmon sees is influenced by the amount of available light, water clarity and mood of the fish.
Colors change depending on depth.
Red is filtered out of the light spectrum in about the first 30 feet, yellow and chartreuse at about 60 feet with green and blue the last to turn gray. White turns to gray at about 60 feet and black is always black, regardless of depth. Thus a deep water salmon will see mostly blues, greens and dark shapes while a salmon in shallow water will see all colors. Even if all other conditions are right, you won't catch salmon if your lure is tangled or has picked up weeds or jellyfish. Salmon, particularly big Chinook, are very wary of anything unnatural in the water.