It will take two articles to cover the Alaskan salmon fishing trip that Ron Spomer and I went on. The main course of the trip was to focus on brown bear/moose hunting and duck hunting. Salmon fishing was something to fill the blank spaces, but due to the spectacular fishing I can hardly call it a side event.
I caught more salmon on a flyrod than I ever have in my life. It was borderline unbelievable. For example, there were two Canadian fishermen in camp and one day they had a race to see how many fish they could land. Mario netted 58 and his cousin netted 62. And they went back to the lodge one hour early.
I’ve caught a lot of silvers in the ocean, but not in rivers. On this trip all we caught were silvers and they were huge. There were a lot of 14 to 15 pounders and plenty of 16’s and quite a few 17’s. On the second day, I caught a beautiful 15-pounder and a few minutes later Ron caught a 17. In the picture, his made mine look like a dink, and a 15 is a big silver!
We fished most of the time within a mile or two of the ocean, so we were catching mainly fresh fish. You want to bring home fresh fish because they taste a lot better. You can tell ones that have been out of the ocean for a while because they start metamorphosing. Their jaw gets hooked and they get darker. In the later stages, they really start to deteriorate.
I’ve fished for pinks, dogs and kings in rivers before, and usually I had to heavily entice them to hit. Not so on these silvers. Boy, you talk about aggressive. Once I had 13 hits in a row. They just slammed our flies.
It seemed like we did best on days that were overcast, not blue bird sunny days. I’ve never been smart enough to correlate everything with the tides, but no doubt, they affect the runs. The theory is when it rains, the fresh water running into the ocean instigates a run. You can tell they’re stacked up waiting to come in as evidenced by the seals at the mouth of the river feeding on them.
But back to fishing. The biggest flyrod I had was a 6-weight, so I went to Cabela’s and got a 9-weight and a heavy salt water fly reel. I don’t like 10-weights because it’s like fishing with a broomstick. Yes, an 8-weight would work, but you’d spend too much time fighting fish and less time catching, so to me, a 9-weight is perfect.
I took a lot of tippet material, 12 to 15 pounds, but like all my salmon fishing, they’re not leader-shy, so a third of the time I just tied onto the leader.
For flies, I had ordered a lot from flydealflies.com, but the guides also tied up a lot of their favorite flies for me. Of course guiding on the river all year they knew what flies work best. And speaking of guides, Alaska Expedition Co. had some great young men. We had a blast and they worked hard for us.
As you know, Alaskan weather is unforgiving and can be brutal. It’s not a place to use rinky dink equipment. We had a few sunny days but usually it sprinkled or just all out pounded us. One night we had 80 mph winds. That’s some serious wind.
In weather like this, you want good gear. We wore Simms waders and boots. Wow, were they comfortable. We put them on when we woke up and didn’t take them off until we went back for dinner. We lived in them. Not only were they comfortable but they didn’t leak a drop.
Charles had advised to wear fleece wading pants. Boy was he right. I grabbed a pair of fleece wading pants at Cabela’s and took a pair of Simms wading pants. Both worked great. I also wore some good wading socks, which are basically a thick knee high hiking sock. I took two raincoats in case I ripped one. I used a Simms Gortex and a Cabela’s Instinct Goretex. Both are excellent.
Well, I haven’t even got into some fishing techniques and we’re out of room. I’ll finish up next week. If you want the silver trip of a lifetime, give Alaska Expedition Co. a call at 800-572-0980.
Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.
