Alaska Slaughter 9/13-9/16 Matt, Dillon, Jim and Jim

It wasn’t the first trip for Jim and his two sons, but it was for his friend Jim.  It was fun getting Jim to catch a fish for the first time on a topwater Wog, as I think it’s the most entertaining way to catch salmon.  We saw a variety of bears over the coarse of 4 days, and enjoyed the wilderness of Alaska. WATCH VIDEO OF DILLON CATCHING A SILVER SALMON.

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Dolly Varden Trout

Dolly Varden Trout

The boys, Matt and Dillon switched back and forth from fly fishing to spin fishing, catching plenty of fish.  I think the boys and I came to grips with the reality that we were killing these fish for food.  I asked them to murder a couple fish for me, and they selectively did.  Coming from trout fishing, and reading a lot about wild alaskan stocks of fish, I want to sustain a healthy fishery as well as make customers happy.  When I eat salmon, I often have leftovers, and I think this is extremely common as salmon is a very filling fish.  Over the coarse of our fishing the majority of the fish that I had seen caught were healthy size female silver salmon, or hen Cohos.  I don’t think that sport fisherman could have as big of an impact of the fishery as the commercial fisherman, but we can selective harvest, as they cannot.  I choose to target the smaller female fish as the meat tends to be better in the smaller fish, as well as to decrease the number of females in the population.  It is common for sport fisherman to target big males, or bucks, but to me it was obvious that this fishery is dominated by hens.  It may have very little impact on the 100,000+ silver salmon run, but I like to think that over the coarse of 4 days with 5 fisherman, and a limit of 4 fish per person, including myself…that’s 80 fish.  If there are 10 other groups on the river, that’s 800 fish a day that we are taking out of the watershed.  We are definitely having an impact.

Here are a couple pictures to help you come to grips with death. We called it the dead-well.  Death is inevitable.

And to top it off, here is a video of THE BEATING HART OF A HALF FILLETED SALMON

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Categories: Guided Fly Fishing Trips

3 Comments

  • Matt Walder says:
    1 October, 2013 at 5:31 am

    Chad, what up man? this is pretty awesome, posting pics and writing up specific trips… Hope everything is back to normal in Boulder. I’ll hit you up next time I’m there or for a guided trip down the line… nice killing fish with you on the Tsiu. It was a bloodbath!

    Reply
  • Dylan Walder says:
    12 October, 2013 at 6:06 am

    Hey Chad,

    Thanks for guiding us on the trip. I’m pretty sure we caught more fish in 5 days than the bears caught the entire season, but I can’t be sure. See you next in your home territory. If I know one thing, it is that you can teach us the proper technique for caching flounder in any habitat. You know it is a hell of a trip when the goal becomes to try to either catch the smallest fish possible or to try to keep the line clean all-together on any given cast. Funny how the goals change once you conquer the challenge. Hell of a trip bro.

    Thanks again,

    Dylan

    Reply

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