Salmon Fishing!

We’re in Coopers Landing, the central hub of the salmon fishing on the Kenai River. Bad news was the dismal weather has settled back in again, cold and rain.

Yesterday we went drift boat fishing for sockeye salmon (“red” salmon) on the Upper Kenai River. We fished this four years ago in the midst of the huge fire on the Kenai Peninsula that burned 170,000 acres. The burn area is vast. At that time when we drove through the fire area towards Homer, we had to wait four hours as they closed the road.

credit Alaska F & G

This is the early run of sockeye on the Kenai, and ends in the next few days. Alaska F&G manages the fishery intensely, doing counts of the migrating salmon and adjusting the daily limit on the fly. The usual limit is 3 fish per angler, however today we had a limit of 6 fish, and tomorrow – the end of the run – they increased the limit to 9 fish because the monitoring of the run has indicated that the goal for the fish not captured of 22,000 to 42,ooo will be exceeded.

We had an excellent guide Adam, the owner of Five Dogs Fishing and had a great boat mate David, an avid fly fisherman from Montana. After a 3:30 wake up call to make a meet up at the boat at 5 am, Adam put us on a spot were the fishing was HOT!

It became obvious quickly why we had such an early start because by mid-morning, the river was wall-to-wall anglers at the spots accessible on foot. They call it “combat fishing.” I didn’t get a picture of the utter chaos we saw on drive back upstream.

Our guide Adam.

Boat-mate David.

Our group landed eight large (~ 7 lbs.) salmon and had a number of escapees, as well as rainbow trout and Dolly Varden char which were released. Quite the day!

There were a lot of “anglers” there of a different species too.

And a mama and baby moose.