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Published: August 12th 2013
Travel so far:
We flew to Minneapolis, then Minneapolis to Anchorage, and then boarded another plane to go from Anchorage to Yakutat.
The traveling part of the trip went as expected for the first half of the trip. The flights were long, but not brutally long. We were able to get some sleep on the first 2 flights. Jim was right at home on the last flight, he found a plane buddy who was a Missouri wrestling alumni and they ended up talking college wrestling for the entire flight to Yakutat.
We landed in Yakutat and pulled up to the airport, which could be easily mistaken for a small house. The car lady was waiting for us when we walked through the airport doors. We loaded all our gear into the Yukon and headed 5 miles to go to our cabin in town. We are staying in the cabin above the shop of our Halibut fishing guide’s shop, directly next to his own home. The cabin has been perfect for us (there is a picture below).
We had enough energy to go to the local grocery store to get some food and drinks for the next day and came home to crash for the night.
Next Morning (Sunday Morning):
We woke up early and were leaving the cabin by 630 am to meet Mark (our halibut Fishing Guide) down at the harbor. The scenery around the harbor (which was the same scenery that surrounded us the entire time while we were fishing) was incredible. There is a picture below that is looking from the top of the harbor street over the sea, forest and mountain range behind it. It truly was an amazing view, picture doesn’t do it total justice.
We hopped in the boat and headed off to the first fishing spot. It took about an hour to get out to the spot and we dropped lines. Our first goal was to try and get as close to our limit of Halibuts (2 per person) as possible. That didn’t take very long. We were letting 40lb halibuts loose at the end (which is a nice keeper on a normal day). We ended up with 12 nice halibuts to bring back to the docks.
Dad landed the first halibut (medium sized – 40lbs) and we realized that these halibut were going to be a little bit of a fight to get in. Everyone started pulling in decent sized Halibuts and a couple of little annoying sharks for a little while. Then Jim decided enough of this medium Halibut crap and decided to land an 80+ lb Halibut. Gave Jim quite a fight for a while but Jim got the best of him. Jim got him to the side of the boat and Mark used his .22 to finish it off.
The action didn’t stop after that. We continued to land nice halibut after nice halibut, having to let most of them loose because we were so close to our limit and were waiting for the bigger ones to fill our limit. Multiple times we had 2, 3 or 4 biting or on the hook at one time. The boat became a shuffling dance for a few minutes when we all had a fish on and were going over and under each other’s poles while walking around the boat.
We needed one more fish to reach our limit and I was lucky enough again to land another fish, and I knew immediately that this one had quite a bit more backbone than one of my 40lber's from earlier. I remembered Jim complaining about how tired his arm was after landing the 80lb’er and I was quickly realizing what he was talking about. We eventually got the fish in the boat and it weighed in at 100lbs. So that was a nice cap on our halibut limit.
Since we had our limit of halibut, we had two options to choose from.
1) Go back into port and get some food and a nap or
2) Continue fishing and try a different spot in an attempt to get our limit of Ling Cod (which is 1 per person per year).
Grandpa said we needed more fish and had hungry mouths to feed back in Iowa, so we decided option 2 and set off for the new spot.
5 minutes of fishing later, we have our limit of Ling Cod (mainly thanks to Grandpa reeling in two good sized Cod).
So at this point we have 12 halibut, 4 lingcod, 4 rock fish, and 2 silver salmon. (the last two were sprinkled in here or there throughout the morning) We had no more fish to catch for our limits and none of us could feel our left arms after hoisting all the fish, so we called it a day and headed back to the harbor. We laid the fish out for pictures (pictures below), and the kept bringing fish up to Mark to filet (who is a magician with a filet knife, so we realized it was probably not a good idea to ever get on Mark’s bad side, but that would be damn near impossible, because he couldn’t have been a nicer or more accommodating guide).
There is a picture below of the filets that we got from all the fish. Mark said that each bucket there is around 40 lbs. Math tells me that 7 buckets equals around 280 lbs of filets (so everyone back home better get used to fish for dinner).
We were all pretty whooped by end of the filleting and came home to make some frozen pizza and take a nap. I’m listening to the other 3 snoring right now and realize I should be doing the same, so I’m going to wrap this up. (FYI: I would be shocked if I ever write this much again, was just pretty excited after the day of fishing.
Ill end with 2 things that I learned from today:
1) If Day 1 is any indication on how this trip will go then we are in for a really good time and more fish than we know what to do with.
2) My wife Jen better be in the process of looking for and purchasing a deep-freeze.
Other than that, everyone is excited to be here and looking forward to what the next week will bring.
We board a bush plane to fly to the camp on the Tsiu River tomorrow morning at 730am. This will allow us to get quite a bit of fly-fishing in tomorrow afternoon.
Ill try and post as soon as possible, but I really have no idea when we will have Internet or if we will (it is Alaska after all).
-MJ
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Eric Nowicki
non-member comment
Why would you eat frozen pizza when you have all that fresh fish.