Fishing Skagway Alaska - The Target “King Salmon”

August 16^th, 2012--- Fishing Skagway Alaska – The Target “King Salmon”

Troy Leblanc, our show editor and camera man, and myself headed from San Antonio, Texas to Skagway, Alaska to meet up with my great friend and fishing guide, Joe Warchuck of  “Fat Salmon Charters”.

We arrived in Skagway via the “Wings of Alaska Airline”.  That meant we had a 40 minute flight down the passage to see some amazing country that God created.   The snowcapped mountains on both sides of the single engine plane gave us an amazing opportunity to shoot video of Alaska since we had smooth sailing at about 2500 feet above the surface of the water.

 

Joe gave me the conventional Alaskan bear hug when I saw him since it's been two years that I’ve had a chance to fish with him.   It didn't take long before were motoring out of the harbor in his fishing boat.  Our sights were on catching Kings with Downriggers. These waters are glacier carved Fjords, and the water depths were over 2700 feet.  We used up to four (4) downriggers simultaneously to get hooked up on some big King Salmon.  It started out little bit slow but we knew sometimes you just got to… work, it work, it work.  We had some nice 20 inch fish for our first rod bending action but we were targeting fish over 28 inches, which is keeper size.  King salmon are truly awesome eating.

 

 

 We had doubles and singles.    Rods were going down at the same time and that creates quite a challenge, remember, you still have downrigger's down which means we've got fishing line down and we've got the Scotty lead 10 pound ball downriggers down so when you get a good fish you have to bring up all the other downrigger's  and the fishing lines so you don't get seriously tangled up.  It was like moving into battle stations, Joe would, for example, get on the rod with the fish and I would bring up the other lines and downriggers, it was fast action for both of us. 

 

Anglers Notes:

When you're using downrigger's you’re really “controlled depth fishing”.  We where working from 60 feet down into the water to over 100 feet down into the water and we did have some of our downrigger's at one depth and others at another depth.  

We tried out different options, another words we have a lure behind a flasher or we have some herring rigs with the hooks throughout the body behind a flasher.   The flasher looks like a king salmon and of course the herring is bait.  The water clarity was not too good, which is typical, so sometimes you really got to put some flash in the water to draw in the bite.   Water clarity is only about 3 feet, so fish can't see very far.  They can see a flash from the flasher and come in to investigate and then they see a piece of herring swimming erratically and he'll take it.  We would rig the herrings so they had a little bend in the body. That's pretty important since the bow in the body would make the bait, kind of twirl in the water and you know what twirling the water looks like.  It looks like a wounded bait fish.

We’ll I think Joe was trying to wear me out.  We caught 32 King Salmon in one day and we finished it out with four monsters.  It was awesome rod bending action with my great buddy Joe Warchuck of Fat Salmon Charters in Skagway Alaska.

We made an amazing fishing show for Television.   Contact Joe at 907-209-7335… fatsalmoncharters@yahoo.com......and he can put you on the fishing trip of a lifetime.

Make sure you budget some time for seeing the sights around Skagway.  You can ride the train up into the mountains, take a high speed raft trip with “Ocean Raft Alaska”—(907-947-9012), and do some sightseeing on Dyea Flats with “Dyea Dave”---(907-209-5031) maybe you'll find some black or grizzly bears snatching salmon from the river.  Also, check out “Sergeant Preston’s Lodge” at –(866-983-2521) it was a great place to stay for us.

As I always say…Thanks for your time and will see you in our next…Wide Open Outdoor Adventure !!

Dave