Prospecting For The Hot Bite
In Southeast Alaska
From a base in Juneau we explore
by tug, charter and lodge hop searching
for the hottest salmon and halibut
bite in Southeast
By Terry W. Sheely
It was a pair of gold-blinded prospectors named Richard Harris and Joe Juneau gouging in the sands of Gastineau Channel at the mouth of Gold Creek who in1880 put Juneau on the map, but by 2008 it was salmon silver and halibut ugly that had us prospecting through Southeast and this time there was a twist.
Instead of staking out a comfortable lodge in a promising location and waiting for “the bite” to come to us, we went out to find it. For five days we prospected for the hottest bites in Southeast; sluicing along an adventurous itinerary powered by tug, charter boat, and lodge guides.
It was a trip punctuated with history, blue ice bergs, a curiously unique salmon hatchery, a rock and roll docking in a lonesome marine park, fresh crab, fresher silvers, ling cod, halibut, monster yellow-eye, whales and a moving feast of Alaskan scenery, lodge hopping, and constantly shifting diversions.
For several years I’d been intrigued by the prospect of exploring Southeast by boat, anchoring out, fishing, crabbing and shrimping on the move, going from point to reef, island to rip line every day a new search for something new. The protected inside waters out of Juneau offered the variety, fishing potential and attractions that I was looking for.
Last winter The Reel News publisher/editor Jim Goerg, and I put the trip together. First stop was Juneau Convention and Visitors Bureau (www.traveljuneau.com) where Director Lorene Palmer and Tourism Marketing Manager Elizabeth Arnett produced a staggering list of options.
The plan that finally panned out covered five days in mid-August that would start on a tug boat, pass through a Whale’s Eye, and travel well fishing through elfin country on the 34-foot “Can Can” with personable Case Harris who specializes in “anything you want.” One to four day custom trips, lodge hopping, sightseeing, hot spotting salmon runs—“All of our adventures,” he says with a grin, “are customized. Just let us know what you’d like.” The odyssey wound up back in Juneau looking for bears from the boardwalk at Mendenhall Glacier and finding prawns at the Twisted Fish that washed down easily with Juneau’s homebrew, Alaskan Amber
The JCVB options included exactly what I was looking for, a chance to investigate the coves, points, islands and fjords of Southeast, sightsee like a tourist, check out a few lodges and new fishing areas, determine if the Alaskan cousins of the Dungeness Spit family of crabs can melt butter and fly home with fresh fillets—both pink and white.
It started out as a fishing trip and became an Alaskan odyssey starting in the Aurora Basin boat harbor where we threw our duffle onto the 42-foot Nordic tug, MV/Legend, (www.alaskalegendcharters.com ) and shook hands with co-owner Dave Carnes (his wife Pat is the other co-owner) and mate Kurt Dzinich. Several Nordic tug operators are based in Juneau that rent as self-guided, BYOB, food and gear bare boats. The Legend is not one of those. “The niche we are working to fill,” Carnes explains, “is to offer two packages: a bareboat with skipper or fully chartered with everything. Bareboat you bring the food, fishing gear, buy fuel, and the rest. Fully chartered you bring your luggage and I do the rest.”
The idea, he says, is “Seeing Alaska in different stages, sightseeing, cruising, history tour, fishing. We’re for people who don’t want to do the cruise ship thing.”
Unlike renovated tugs that were originally built to bang ships and haul barges, “The Legend” was built in Burlington, WA specifically for chartering and it shows--12 KW generator, microwave, freezer, refrigerator, three burner electric stove, two staterooms, one with a king size bed in the bow the other with stacked twin berths, a settee with dark blue leather, and a teak and brass interior polished to a golden amber.
Fog swirls like a misty belt around Mount Roberts, rain splatters and just a few days ago the ADFG earned the wrath of non-residents everywhere when it imposed, temporarily they say, a 48-inch minimum limit on chinook salmon for non-residents only. For locals the minimum is still 28 inches, for non-residents the minimum is the fish of a lifetime—48-inches is a 50 pounder easy. We’ll be fishing for silvers.
We’re headed for Taku Harbor 17 miles south of Juneau, at a blistering 9.5 knots burning 5 gallons of fuel every hour. Blue chunks of broken glaciers drift past, some the size of yachts. Humpback whales give us the eye and fluke slaps. When we get there we’ll tie up at a public wharf at Taku Marine Park, on a carpet of clams and shellfish, set crab pots and stare into the mist at a black bear bolting across the yellowish kelp into a green forest of head-high beach grass.
Dave noses the Legend up to Scar Face a 3,254’ cliff where glaciers scraped the mountain side off. “You can see what the inside of a mountain looks like,” our guide says. Glacial striations cross the face in huge welts of white lines and cross sections of quartz veins. In spring, Dave says, mountain goats push their newborn kids onto the cliff face defying gravity and wolves.
A horsetail waterfall braids and gushes a stream of cream and white down the granite diorite face. At the base of the cliff the saltwater is 430-feet deep.
Twenty miles into the mountains is Canada and closer is imposing Taku Glacier which is advancing, irrevocably, toward a narrow neck and the mouth of Taku River where fish mangers worry that it will eventually push across, seal off the river and eliminate one of Southeast’s most productive commercial sockeye fisheries.
Before we get there, though, we’ll see two float planes unload seven fly fishermen at Slocum Creek to play with pinks, and we’ll drop trolling lines at Butler Point. Squalls are bouncing around the inlet like sodden pinballs and the wind is building. Jim hooks the first silver while he’s feeding out line and still holding the downrigger release.
I catch a twin—both are fat, short 12 pounders. Jim catches another and I cracker one at the boat, all on orange-headed hoochies sweetened with strips of herring. We keep three.
It’s crazy at the state dock, winds swirling and hitting 38 knots. Dave makes three passes before the big boat noses close enough to rope a line. The beach is a shatter of little necks, butter clams, cockles, and tangles of blue mussels. We set two crab pots, baited with salmon heads, and drop them in front of a line of commercial pots buoys that bob like blunted pickets between the white caps.
The wind is still smacking us sideways when Skipper David puts on the filet mignon. We open the celebratory first-day amber and corn chips and tell fish stories.
The next day the air is clear enough to see the snow-streaked mountains on Admiralty Island. Breakfast is in the oven—an intriguing concoction of eggs poured into pockets in a homemade hash, bulging like rows of golden globes treading in a puddle of meat and potatoes.
While breakfast bakes we move south, past more blue glaciers, to Port Snettisham where a power plant and hatchery are embedded in the mountain of rock at the mouth of the Speel River. The shoreline is rugged, vertical and scarred with glacier tracks. On April 16, Kurt explains, a monster avalanche roared down that wall and swept away 5 miles of power lines and three towers plunging Juneau into the dark and onto backup generators for more than a month. We snag a skiff off the mooring buoy and follow a piling row up channel to DiPAC’s Snettisham Hatchery, one of the largest sockeye producers in the world—turning out 8 million smolts a year to feed commercial industries of 10 tribes, two nations, one state and one province. The cold water that turns the turbines on Juneau’s power supply, also provides the power for the hatchery—with water that is too cold for any of the other four species of Pacific salmon, according to hatchery manager Kevin Steck. We take the tour, disinfecting our boots at every doorway. A purse seiner strains the water in front of the hatchery. “You can fish around the net” Kevin says, “but keep an eye out for bears.” We decline.
The closer we get to Juneau the better the weather.
Friend Rick Bierman is waiting for us. Rick his wife Karen and son Jessie operate Whale’s Eye Lodge www.juneaualaskafishing.com ) off the grid on roadless Shelter Island a 30 minute boat ride from Juneau. Karen calls their remote operation, a “micro-lodge adventure” a 30 minute boat ride from Juneau, self-sufficient and off the grid, with room for 6 guests at best. “Could be tough fishing,” Rick says, and he’s right. The fishing area is between silver runs and the famous Gastineau Channel fishery for hatchery chinook is long past. In June this is a great chinook fishery allowing four hatchery kings a day that do not count against the nonresident daily or annual bag king limit.
We pot some crabs for dinner, I nail a stray 12-pound silver off Point Retreat Lighthouse on the north tip of Admiralty Island but it’s dead slow. The water temperature is 10 degrees colder than normal and the silver run is two weeks late.
It can be dynamite fishing here, we know that. Jim and I have crossed the eyes of silvers, pinks, chums and chinook with Rick on several occasions and we know how good his lodge fishery can be. The rumor mill says the big run of silvers is still outside in the ocean. Until they arrive it’ll be slim pickings on the inside waters in Stephens Pass and Saginaw Channel.
Normally, when I land at a lodge between salmon runs it makes me a tad antsy, but not today. Tonight we’ll get to enjoy Rick and Karen’s hospitality, bunk in the two-room guesthouse perched at the water's edge overlooking the Chilkat Mountains and a whale trail in Saginaw Channel, and enjoy the decadent home cooking that Karen creates on her grandmother’s antique wood-fired cook stove-- crab enchiladas, barbeque beef, topped off with homemade cheesecake under a heap of blueberry fluff.
Tomorrow Jim and I intend to get serious about going to the fish....wherever they may be. After a breakfast we’ll leave Whale’s Eye Lodge, and climb on board the 35-foot Can Can with Case Harris of Alaskan Marine Adventures (www.AlaskanMarineAdventures.com) and head out Icy Strait on a four-hour run to find fish.
Case Harris’s operation is key to our Southeast odyssey.
Alaska Marine Adventures specializes in putting together “custom trips” of 1 to 4 days, and Case’s preference is what he calls “Lodge Hopping”, stopping and sometimes overnighting at lodges throughout Southeast as he cruises the inside waters cherry picking salmon runs, halibut bites, adding ling cod, yellow eye, and rockfish—dropping shrimp and crab pots then moving on, jumping from point to point, with whale watching, wildlife and scenic stops filling in the blanks.
Anchored out, the Can Can can sleep 4 comfortably, 5 in a pinch and fish up to 6. Deckhand is Jan Henry, a dive guide from Key West up to Juneau to work the summer and learn Alaska, she says.
Water is flat, smooth, and an easy ride. Humpback whales, sea lions, seals, eagles and sea birds are constantly in view. The further west we go, the thicker the air gets. Fog and mist hang from dripping overcast.
We cruise through a pod of humpback whales at Port Adolphus, pass the outpost town of Gustavus, and cross the halibut flat at the mouth of Glacier Bay National Park where a weak sun shines on peaks and glaciers in the Fairweather Range.
Off the bow, marbled murrelets lift off gray water that is as smooth as true cod skin. We watch Mud Bay slide past on the north end of Chichagof Island, and Jim shakes his head. Two years ago he and I were stranded in that bay, isolated on a small island, without a guide, a boat or a gun, surrounded by a 20-foot rising tide that was pushing us toward a cluster of small trees on a patch of high ground that we were to share with a brown bear the size of an old Buick.
We’re headed for the curious little community of Elfin Cove which is built on a boardwalk bolted to a rock wall that forms the diminutive cove where Icy Strait falls into Cross Sound and disappears into the ocean. This is the “outside” where silvers are rumored to be, and we know from past experience that it’s a dynamite halibut, ling and yelloweye producer. The closer we get to Elfin Cove the grayer the day becomes until the mist turns into steady drenching rain.
Case drops the hook on a pinnacle outside of Elfin and we drop jigs carrying huge chunks of fresh salmon toward halibut 80 to 100 feet down. In the mist, we make out small boats trolling for silvers. A sea lion surface with a silver in its mouth, attracting a squabble of terns and gulls. A good sign!
Several whales repeatedly circle our boat in some sort of fluke slapping ritual. I catch a large black rockfish and Jan serves lunch, marinated chicken, salad and a slice of pear pie which is exactly like apple pie without the apples.
We swing over a ledge that drops from 40 into 100 feet of water and two rods go off. Jim’s is a 27-inch yelloweye rockfish, mine is a 341/2 inch ling cod.
Ling season opened the day before and my fish fits into slot limit of 30 to and 35 inches.
Our halibut rods are 5’6” Barefoot stand up rods, with roller guides and Penn 338 reels, carrying 24 ounces of round lead, 6/0 Owner circle hooks, 100-pound test Tuff Line with wire leaders. Serious gear.
Rain stops, visibility improves, the tide is churning and we head for the dock and The Cove Lodge (www.covelodge.com) where Jim and I will spend the night soaking up Gordy Wrobel’s hospitality, listening to his guests’ explain how the silvers are just moving in, how hard and fast the morning bite came on and taking seconds on a dinner of pork loins and bacon-wrapped shrimp. The Cove Lodge accommodates 10 guests and offers guided fishing packages with three cruisers that can handle four fishermen each.
Originally from Minnesota, Wrobel fished here, fell in love with the place and
now he owns it. He is also the mayor of Elfin Cove and one of its 14 year-round residents And he unabashedly ranks, “the halibut fishing as the best I’ve seen anywhere, sometimes they’re as shallow as 60 feet, sometimes 250 but a lot of halibut in the 100 foot range.
Add lings, yelloweye, summer-long runs of chinook, coho, and pink salmon, cowboy encounters with salmon sharks and freshwater fishing for Dolly Varden, native ‘bows, cutts, and steelhead—and I can see why he never went back to Minnesota. “Lodge starts fishing at 7:30 a.m.” he says, “No sense hurting yourself, the fish are always there.”
And according to his guests and skippers the silvers are starting to arrive, coming in spits and spurts, every new day better than the last. This is a place for fishermen, wood paneled walls, hot tub, popcorn machine, mounted furbearers, glass-eyed fish and a view that goes straight up the strait.
Elfin Cove sits at the mouth of the Inside Pass with a daily option of fishing the open ocean or protected inside waters depending on weather, waves, fish movements and disposition. Both areas produce.
We hear that the commercial trollers have been given an ocean opening for kings, which is tough to swallow with the 48-inch rule still in place for nonresident fishermen.
In the lodge hangs a mount of a 46 inch king—it weighed 64 pounds.
But we’re targeting silvers and talk at breakfast was of a wall of migrating coho that is stacked in Cross Sound at the mouth of Icy Strait. Boat limits by 10 a.m. were common.
We tell Case about the wall of silvers, he scratches the morning halibut hunt and we head for Cross Sound, rigging downrigger rods with coho flies tied with Peacock Krystal Flash on 35-poundGamakatsu mooching rigs, solid tied 5/0 6/0 hook, and sweetened with a strip of herring pinned onto the lead hook. The rig is fished behind a green Mylar flasher. Backup rods are readied rigged with blue and white hoochies with winged bobbers spinning on the nose, a slash of herring side on the lead hook and blue Mylar flashers.
We’re on an incoming tide and the kelp line is littered with buckskin logs, gull feathers and coho.
Fishing at 50 and 80 feet, we immediately nail two fish on the peacock flies then another two on the blue and whites. We’re allowed six coho each, the bite is on and we’re choosy. The sixth fish turns into a story. I’m on the rod with a coho jumping behind the boat, twice, three times into the air and then a fourth....and that’s when I notice that there’s no flasher. Impossible! The flasher is tied in ahead of the hooks and if there are hooks in the fish there has to be a flasher!
When I finally skate the coho into Case’s net, we see the flasher and hooks trailing a good 10 feet back in the water. Apparently my coho simply ran into the line, bucked into the infamous coho twist, and wrapped itself into a full-body tangle with one wrap around the gills and another around snout. I give a pull on the leader and the fish unrolls like string off a stick.
We keep eight silvers 7 to 12 pounds and go halibut fishing. Case anchors the Can Can in 140 feet of water near the Porpoise Islands in Icy Strait and Jim and I each catch chicken halibut, legal lings and a couple of yelloweye rockfish. Jim’s yellow-eye is a monster more than two-feet long.
Jan brings out the brunch omelets and we point the bow of the Can Can at Juneau some 85 miles east. Streamers of clouds flow around the mountains cutting off visibility at 400 feet, hanging like strips of ribbon draped across elfin hills and the hobbit hole and blowing past the Cross Sound entrance. The water is a gray green and silken. Whales seem to be everywhere.
We’ve got a nice load of white and pink meat in the fish box, 85 miles of protected saltwater fishing between the ocean and Juneau still ahead of us to fish, and room left on our halibut and coho limits. Our “lodge-hopping” skipper has picked out a slew of halibut honey holes and salmon slots that are worthy of prospecting along the way, and he’s tickled silver to show us.
This was a good trip. I could get used to being a footloose prospector searching for coho silver and halibut ugly with side trips to wildlife, history, scenery and the unexpected.
This trip, forgive the pun, really panned out.
Who to Contact
Dave Carnes – Legend Charters– 907.586.4886– iinfo@alaskalegendcharters.com / www.alaskalegendcharters.com
Rick Bierman – Whale’s Eye Lodge - 907.723.2920- whaleseye@starband.net / www.juneaualaskafishing.com
Case Harris – Alaska Marine Adventures – 907.789.3474– info@AlaskanMarineAdventures.com/ www.AlaskanMarineAdventures.com<
Gordy Wrobel - Cove Lodge – 907.239.2221– GordyWrobel@CoveLodge.com / www.covelodge.com
Juneau Convention & Visitors Bureau -907.586.1737- www.traveljuneau.com
One Sealaska Plaza,
Suite 305Juneau, Alaska 99801