We found the same massive clouds of bait in the inlet earlier in the week. Floor to ceiling in 70-80' at times. The vast majority of it seemed like small 3" herring - that's what the birds were attacking, anyway. The big news for us is that we managed to jig up some squid. Not a ton, but I brought home 7-8 for dinner with the gf. That might've been what your lines were hitting if you were dredging the bottom. They were anywhere from 70-150'. I'm sure there were some big herring about, too, but we didn't run into any.
Oh, we didn't touch a single salmon and only marked a few all day, but we were jigging from our kayaks and got distracted by the squid.