Fishing Update / Doc Warners - Alaska Fishing Adventures

Fishing Update
August 9 - 13, 2010

Big tides, bright sunshine, rainy day, calm winds, blue skies, lots of fish moving, and pinks stacked in front of the beach getting ready to go up the stream. Those were the conditions our guests experienced last week. For those experienced in fishing this part of Alaska you see both positives and negatives in those descriptive terms. Big tides limit halibut fishing and bright sunshine push the salmon deeper; neither of which promote big catches of fish. However, most of the other factors work to offset the limiting factors and we ended up the week with 124 boxes of fish which was the final proof that it was a good week.

Halibut fishing continues to produce good catches. On Thursday we had three 100+ pounders on the dock at the same time. The fish were caught in diverse locations ranging from green buoy to log dump to the waterfall. This is a good indication of just how strong the halibut run is and how spread out the fish are. We are catching them along shore lines, in trenches, and on top of ridges. Those not steeped into fishing just traditional spots are having a blast discovering nice fish in all of these here-to-fore never fished before places.

Salmon fish continued good throughout the early part of the week. Surprisingly, the number of large bright pinks is still high and accounted for almost 50% of the early weeks catch. Almost daily we could see the proportion of silvers in the catch increase. Wednesday and Thursday we saw a group of large silvers come onto the dock. We gave away a 20-pound pin and had 4 15-pounders on the dock the same afternoon. Reports of broken tackle (always that fish the did something the angler thought was unfair) increased which is always a sign that the bigger fish are showing and exposing the anglers' fishing flaws. Skies turned sunny on Thursday and Friday and temperatures climbed into the 70's--too hot-- and the salmon catch dropped some.

It was a good week with happy guests, sunburned skin, and big smiles.

~Mark

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