Early August on the Parks

I hope I don’t jinx myself writing this, but this is arguably the best weather I’ve ever experienced in August. We’re nearly halfway through the month and I’m not soaking wet and cold everyday I’m on the water. The silver fishing has been incredible and the trout are starting to really fatten up for the winter months ahead. This is truly the best time of the season.

Our fishing lately has consisted of bouncing from run to run to focus on wherever the pink salmon are spawning. We fish behind them for fat rainbows and grayling that are sucking up the excess eggs that make it past the nests. Fishing anywhere else in the river for trout is merely a waste of time and an act of futility. Fishing bead rigs under an indicator has proven to be the most successful. I personally like to fish South Central Bead Co beads as the owner Ken truly knows the river that he designs his bead colors for. They “match the hatch” better than any other beads out there, hands down.

I seem to be spending less time fishing for trout, however, and more time on the salmon while they are still moving into the system. For the salmon I look for the small pools and frog water in the sloughs along the edges of the river. Salmon sitting along the main channel or in the current seem to be more lockjawed than those that can sit in the slow stuff.

Pinks and chums are still in thick and working through them to get to the silvers can be frustrating. Catching a couple of hard fighting chums is fun at first, but when you know there’s a chance of landing a fat silver for the grill, it becomes more of a chore when you hook one. Don’t get me wrong though. I still love catching chums. But it becomes annoying after you’ve hooked your 12th one in a hole and they keep intercepting the fly before it can even reach the silver you are casting at.

I’ve had my best luck throwing large, bright colored streamers like Dolly Llamas into a pool and stripping them back as quickly as possible to entice a strike. I instruct my clients to cast as far as they can and strip back quickly and consistently in 6-8” pulls. It never gets old watching the line go tight as the client strips the line and seeing the bright arc of a fresh silver fly out of a pool and absolutely annihilate the fly.

You can instantly tell the difference between a silver and chum by the way they take off after the hookset. Silvers will jump and leap high in the air, sometimes a half dozen times during the fight. They’ll run around sticks, under logs and shake their head aggressively as they try to rid themselves of the hook. They spin and twist and roll over and over again and just when I think I can go in for the net, they magically spring back to action and take off for another run again. They are incredibly fun to catch and just as good to eat.

I highly encourage my clients to only keep bucks, or males, as they don’t have the same effect on future populations like the hens, or females, do. Hens may lay up to 4,500 eggs during the spawn, and each egg could potentially return in several years to perform the same spawning dance that the species has done for millenia. The males also seem to have better meat, as the females put so much of their energy into egg production. I also question my anglers everyday on if they truly have the capability to either eat the fish fresh or preserve it for the rest of their trip, as I do not want to unnecessarily kill a fish that will go to waste. I’ve released more silvers this year than I’ve bonked.

As we transition into the last couple of weeks of August, I can only keep my fingers crossed that our weather holds and that the salmon continue to run up the creeks in high numbers. The trout need more food to get through the winter and the fresh fish I see push in every day keeps my hopes up that we will have good fishing for several more weeks. It’s one of the best times of year in Alaska, and we need to enjoy it while we can.