Alaska Fishing

For the past couple of years, I've been fortunate to accompany three other guys to experience Alaska salmon fishing. We usually go in early August (the best time of year for silver salmon). Whaler's Cove Lodge is located on the west coast of Admiralty Island about halfway between Juneau and Sitka and near the native village of Angoon. I've combined two years of this adventure on one page .. none of the photos do the place justice. The time with my three traveling companions has added to fun and lasting memories that cannot be replicated.

Meet John, Jerry, and David. We always fly in a day early to get reacquainted, do a little shopping at the hardware and liquor stores and get our trash talking routine perfectly calibrated.

In addition, we also do a little touring around the marinas, restaurants, and watching all the tourists from the cruise ships. This is a picture of the Mendenhall Glacier which is just a 10 minute drive from town.

And this is our captain and true fishing expert, John Beath. He barks orders like most captains and is dead serious about catching fish.

Jerry with a nice king salmon. We are usually a little out of season to catch these fish .. in 2015 we caught several but only a couple in 2016 when we were 2 weeks later in the season for kings .. of course, they're fish, what do they know?

We saw many whales on the 2015 trip ... not many at all on the 2016 trip. On this trip they would come right by the boat, so close you could smell their breath when they exhaled. Whale breath is NOT a good smell.

We also saw several whales breaching but most were too far away. This one was close enough to catch with the telephoto lens.

This is called bubble feeding. The whales group up together below the surface and below what they feed on. Then, they all come up together in kind of a circle, surrounding the fish they feed on and chasing them up to the surface. It's an amazing spectacle.

We typically leave the dock at 7:45 and return around 5:00. Every boat gets to display their catch for the others. This was a typical day. The big fish are halibut.

These are the type of boats we fish with. 22 foot with a cabin (nice for when it rains and we're moving to another spot). They also have a head.

Wonderful scenery while trolling for salmon. The strait is less than 10 miles wide with many coves. Water depth is almost immediately over 300 feet as the boat gets out of the harbor where the marina is.

Coming into the marina after a day of fishing. The lodge is the green roof by the trees. This is where we eat and prepare our lunches for when we're out on the boat. The fish processing plant is the smaller green roof building right by marina and has it's on flash freezing system.

This is very large silver salmon that John caught. And he can't wait to get his trolling line back in the water. Captain John really loves it when his charges get into the fish.

As the lodge process fish from each boat, they post the weight of the catch for each individual. For us, we evenly split all of the fish by type and box them up. This picture was taken the morning we were leaving .. 125 pound of fileted fish for each. In 2016 it was 137 pounds.

Everyone is waiting for the float plane to take us back to Juneau. The fish are frozen and packed in 50 pound boxes. We keep them in a freezer overnight in Juneau and check them for a 5:30 am flight the next day.