So people often ask me where to go fishing in Alaska and I often point them to Kodiak Island. The place is beautiful and you can have an amazing do-it-yourself adventure at a reasonable price by just renting a car, staying at a B&B (The absolute best: A Smiling Bear) and eating on the cheap (there’s Taco Bell, Safeway, etc).
The Kodiak road system takes you to some pretty epic fishing…fresh and surf…and through some awesome countryside. I’ve made a couple trips up there over the past few seasons and this is one from 2011 that I finally got to putting to video.
Category Archives: Destinations
Kodiak Island Car Fishing Adventure!
Boys Day Off: Lake Nacimento fishing trip
So sometimes you just have to get out and get away from town…and go do something a little different once in a while.
That’s exactly what K-Dawg, Scotty & I did yesterday when we headed down to Central California’s Lake Nacimento, where we chased after white bass and spotts. It was a great day just getting out and hanging with the fellas, away from all the drama of guiding and commercial crabbing.
Luckily, we put together a few patterns and had a nice day of catching…for the cherry on top!
Here’s a little pictorial. While we found very few fish near the inlets (not much water this year), we managed to locate some nice schools of shad…and, I the afternoon, there were some boils…which led to a flurry of fun topwater action…
But we also caught most of our fish on small plastics worked near the bottom…
Scotty with a nice spotty…
Fun little exotics: white bass look like a striper and and crappie got together. Called “sand bass” or “sandies” in the South, they are pretty fun on light gear…
The lake was lower that last time we went a few years back, but after a rainless winter, I expected the lake elevation to be even lower…
Another nice spott on the popper…
Good times and a nice sunset on the way home…
What a season: American River Steelhead, 2013!
We here in Sacramento, CA were treated to the best winter steelhead season the American River has produced since the mid 1980′s. Considering I’ve fished this river since the 1970′s, it was a delight to see her healthy and vibrant again. For several years, the American had become the “Ameri-Can’t” and catching an adult steelhead was a difficult proposition.
There has been a strong effort to improve the river’s fisheries in recent years — spawning gravel has been placed in the American’s upper reaches and water temps are cooler in the summers. Hopefully, 2013 was just the beginning of this great urban river’s revival!
Flyfishing for Great Lakes Steelhead & Brown Trout
I have yet to make the trip out to the Great Lakes area for some river fishing, but I have to say there are quite a few fisheries there that look really interesting…
The Craziest Kings on the Planet!
God, I love king salmon! They’re such badass creatures, aren’t they? And there’s nowhere on the planet better than Alaska’s Nushagak River to experience these bad boys in all their glory. In June and July, the ‘Nush gets invaded by mind-boggling numbers of fish, and the kings themselves are the craziest, most aggressive, over-the-top snappy ones you’ll find anywhere.
Though I’m retired now, I spent 7 years guiding this amazing stream at a lodge called Alaska King Salmon Adventures and, every year about this time, that little itch starts…the little twinge at the back of my skull that tells me I should be thinking about heading north. While I haven’t been to the river in several years, the memories of its loco kings still haunt my dreams. … Continue Reading
British Steel
Okay,so Richard Masters and Guy Lyburn, our U.K. fishing correspondents, took my advice recently and headed for the Holy Grounds of steelhead fishing: British Columbia. Here’s their report…
Go to BC next, JD told us as we sat around the campfire in Salmon Camp along the Klamath River back in 2009. So, much planning later, we headed to the extreme North of Canada, fly rods packed together with high hopes. Three flights and 18 hours later from Manchester, England we hit Smithers, BC and the cheap motel beds never looked more welcome.
After seven days of crumpled maps, roadtrips, too much money spent in tackle shops, Oreo cookies and full srength Coke, we hit the Skeena river, after a slow start on a low Bulkley river and only one fish between us.
Three days of magic followed, with the Skeena providing seven solid Steel medals for an olympic effort from Team UK! Cheers and thanks for the advice about BC. I’ve just got to go back…
Atlantic Salmon Fishing on the Ponoi
If you have some time to kill in the ol’ office today, check out this video! Beautiful footage of an amazing river full of awesome fish!
A once prolific Steelhead Stream: The Los Angeles River
If you could go back in time to the 1940′s and 1950′s, you would find a very different looking Los Angeles River than you see today.
Back then, the river was free-flowing and hosted a robust run of steelhead. Hard to believe these days since the poor dilapidated river has been reduced to a graffiti covered concrete drainage ditch in the heart of massive urban sprawl. Now, broken bottles and diapers are the norm…not chrome ocean-run rainbows.
But there are parts of the stream…upstream of downtown LA…that still kinda resemble an actual river. I spent some time exploring one such reach on Friday. It was exciting to see that there is still a bit of river left.
And it was thriving with waterfowl, plus many fish eating birds like cormorants, herons and egrets. In the slow pools, there were clouds of minnows and some slightly larger fish as well. In fact some folks were even fishing. I wanted to believe that the fish were schools of steelhead fry but I of course knew better.
As cool as it was to see so much wildlife mere feet from a e-waste recycling center and roaring I-5, it was also so damned depressing to see how destroyed this once amazing waterway is. So, it was with mixed emotions that explored this area. Here’s a photo essay of my trek…