Fishing Update / Doc Warners - Alaska Fishing Adventures

Fishing Updates

July 30, 2007

The week started with a minor ‘blow’ and the wind blew Icy Strait into an uncomfortable fishing arena on Monday. However, the rest of the week was pleasant with mostly calm waters and plenty of fish. This summer continues to be an overall delight in terms of both weather and abundance of fish.

We catch a couple of kings each week, and in spite of repeated warnings to guest to “check the mouth before you club the fish” an occasional king is not released when it should have been. As the education process continues the problem diminishes.

There are still chums in the area but the catch trend for the past three weeks has been down. The catches have gone from 112, to 103, to 68 the three past week. The fish are still bright and make nice additions to the larder.

As we predicted the pinks were very abundant. The catch jumped from 1330 the previous week to 1700 this past week. We are now seeing some brought to the dock that are not worth bringing home as their meat is beginning to deteriorate as they near spawning time. Still the fishing for pinks is fast and fun.

Silver fishing increased steadily as the week progressed. We had a flurry of silvers in mid-July then things slowed the next week. Toward the end of this past week the silver catch began showing strong signs. We know that all the runs are a little late this year, probably because of colder water caused by more snow-melt-runoff. The commercial catches seem to be down about 60% for this time of year which is another indication that runs are coming later. We took 190 silvers last week and early catch data on August 6, 2007 showed lots of silvers so we are optimistic about this years’ silver run.

The halibut catch was off some from the previous week but that was expected since we had larger tides during the week. The halibut are still abundant and I think we are taking a few more of the larger fish than we did last year.

We were able to test our new Stabi-Craft boats this past week (www.stabicraft.com). The one we have in service as a Chase Boat, a 17-footer, worked very well and we like how it handles on the water. We will see how it holds up under the rigors of Chase Boat life. We tried a 14-footer as a potential fishing boat for two people but didn’t like how it handled on the water so we are going to send it back to Juneau. We will have the new 18-footer by next weekend and test it during the remainder of the season.

— Doc

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