Fishing in Ketchikan

[luv2cruiseprincess]

Has anyone gone out fishing in Ketchikan during the last week of may &/or first week of June? I know the only salmon at that time is King Salmon. Halibut is also "out", are they fun to catch? I don't want to sink a lot of money into a fishing trip if it's not that great. I love fishing!! We live in the Northeast so deep-sea fishing is pretty minimum. Our fish here are alot smaller. Thanks

[SourDoughSteve]

oops :o

[SourDoughSteve]

Catching a halibut, even a smaller one (35 lbs or so) can put up quite a struggle. But that's about the preferred size for eating. As it is a flat fish a good size one can feel like you're reeling up a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. As they are such a strong fish your charter captain will usually ask if you want to keep the larger ones before beginning the process of bringing it on board by shooting it. The last thing you want is a 100+lb fish flopping around the boat. They can damage the vessel and you quite severely. The current Alaska State Trophy record for a halibut is 459lbs caught off the Aleutians.

 

I've fished during the time of year you mention and the king fishing is usually good. We've had times when everyone on the boat got a strike and we were struggling to keep the lines from getting tangled up. It was a fishermans ballet

[frames]

We recently returned from a great trip to Alaska! One thing that could have

gone better was fishing in Ketchikan. Here is what happened...

 

About 25-30 of us had signed up for this excursion. The woman who met us at the pier to check us in told us that the fishing had been hit and miss over the last few weeks. That did not sound encouraging, but then again, that’s fishing. While she was leading us down to the fishing boats she got a message on her walkie-talkie. Right after that she said, “Oh bleep! Orcas in the channel”. Now if we were on a whale watching excursion, this would have been good news. However, orcas eat salmon and salmon know that. Therefore salmon get out of there. Once again, this was not good news for salmon fishing.

 

We caught nothing, didn’t even get a bite. Between the lack of recent rain, bright sunny day, the tide going out, and orcas in the channel, well these were not good for fishing. However, the scenery was beautiful! We were never far from shore. In my estimation, we were typically close enough to throw a baseball to shore. It was deep there though. One picture I took of the monitor showed the depth at 194 feet.

 

Basically it went straight down. I saw one guy on another boat catch a king salmon. But that was it. The two guys that we shared the boat with were scheduled to go fishing in Juneau and Prince Rupert. I did run into these guys towards the end of the cruise and they told me they caught nothing on those excursions. Oh well, that’s why they call it fishing instead of catching. J

 

We trolled up and down for a few hours. There were probably 10-15 other boats like ours, each having 4-6 people on them. Even the commercial vessel in the area did look like they had much action.

 

Maybe next time!!!