Annual freezer: Filling Trip in Prince William Sound

Each year my wife and I make a trip out to Prince William Sound to fill the freezer. We go with a large group of friends and coworkers that book out an entire boat with Crazy Rays Adventures. We fish for halibut, silver salmon, rockfish, cod and whatever else happens to take our baits. It’s a fun trip that marks the end of summer and gives us another chance to stock up for the winter.

This year we booked an AirBnB in Girdwood the night before our trip. We had to make the first tunnel going to Whittier and leaving Willow at 2:30 a.m. didn’t sound like a fun proposition. We made it through the tunnel, barely, picked up breakfast and hopped on our boat for the day.

We made a relatively short run to the halibut grounds, less than two hours from port. Our deckhand ran us through what we would expect and gave us a crash course on how we would be fishing. Once we were stopped and on anchor, each of us picked a rod and promptly stood behind it. I took up a position on the port side, Emily one rod down from me on the left and Jett to the rod on my right. Once given the go ahead, we all dropped down to the bottom and gave the reel three cranks up.

I don’t remember a ton of the specifics, as it can be a bit repetitive. Drop down, reel up, wait, watch the rod tip, turn around to watch someone else reel in a fish, then turn back around to watch your rod, look over at the rod of the person next to you, turn around again to watch someone else catch one, etc. My first fish of the day was a non pelagic rockfish, a spiky burnt orange color. The boat landed several cod and everyone ended up with at least one oversized halibut (oversize is any fish over 27”).

Once finished with halibut, we took a half hour ride back to fish for salmon. I enjoy mooching, which involves dropping a plastic squid with a piece of cut herring down to a certain depth and then quickly reeling or jigging it back to the surface to entice a bite. It’s very active and keeps the enthusiastic angler engaged.

A few people on the boat hit rockfish near the bottom, and as we drifted away from the large rock we were fishing behind, we began to get into salmon. For a while it was a salmon frenzy. The captain and deckhand were running all over the boat netting fresh silvers and dropping them in the back of the boat. They would flip around, bright silvery scales scattering all over the floor. Some of the larger fish were upwards of 12 pounds and very fat.

I was lucky enough to be one of those anglers. I dropped my mooching rig down for six seconds and quickly reeled my line in. I felt the silver smash my herring and I set the hook and held on. I brought the fish towards the surface and the deckhand reached over and scooped it up.

Not long after we got into the action I looked out across the flat water and saw a whale breach. Within minutes several more orcas moved in and began feeding on the salmon we had just been fishing through. The boat was treated to a spectacular show for the next hour as several pods of orcas fed around us. It was amazing to watch them surface and spout, long black dorsal fin sticking out of the water. One even had a floppy dorsal that lay down to the side.

As cool as it was to see the orcas, they absolutely killed our salmon fishing. We made a couple more passes before calling it quits and motoring back to the dock. Our deckhand made quick work of all of the fish on the back of the boat and had them filleted and bagged in less than two hours. The seas were calm and we raced through low hanging clouds, the dark outlines of forested islands all around us.

Once back to the parking lot we split up our fish and filled our coolers. We all said our goodbyes and drove back to the tunnel to wait for the next opening. Our annual freezer filling ocean adventure was another success and we can’t wait until next year to do it all over again. Huge shoutout to Crazy Rays Adventurers for always putting us on fish and showing us a good time.