Fishing Updates

June 25 , 2006

On Tuesday of this week the salmon, both pinks and silvers, arrived in good numbers.  We've been struggling to find salmon thus far this season.  The salmon catch increased dramatically over the previous week.  The encouraging part of this improvement in salmon numbers is that it looks like the silvers are here in big numbers.  Two years ago this happened and silver fishing stayed great all summer.  The pink salmon are numerous and big.  I've seen, and caught, several in the 8-10 pound range.

The impact of arriving salmon is evident in the catch numbers.  The week of June 11-17 we caught 6 silvers and 10 pinks.  This past week we caught 239 silvers and 229 pinks.  During this same time period the chum harvest jumped from 13 fish to 81 fish.  Even the king harvest increased from 5 fish to 16 fish. 

This has been such a different year for king salmon that we don't know if the run will drop dramatically this coming week, which would be the normal trend, or will continue stronger for another week.

The number of small halibut remain strong, but the number of big halibut is skimpy.  If you've been watching the "catch data" on the web site you will notice that the average take home is down from previous years and the number of fish caught is less than with previous years.  Since the number of fish caught and released is just an estimate the number of fish caught statistic is not very reliable.  It does however reflect trends and the trend thus far this year is fewer, and smaller, halibut.  The lower weight of fish fillets is a direct impact of not catching the bigger halibut.

Guests spent a lot more time fishing for salmon this past week because they were plentiful.  More time on salmon means less time on halibut and fewer halibut caught.  All-in-all it was a good week, with happy guests, and great weather.

— Doc

Previous Reports:

• June 19, 2006
• June 11, 2006
• June 4, 2006
• May 28, 2006
• May 8, 2006
• May 4, 2006
• 2005 Fishing Season