Uncrowded late-season salmon fishing

Last week I mentioned my intention to guide one last salmon fishing trip to the Little Susitna River., because I did not feel like there were many other viable options to guide a boat charter with a reasonable chance of catching salmon. Here’s a report on what happened with that trip, scheduled to be run on Tuesday September 9.

The night before the charter, I received an e-mail informing me that only two of the 4 people scheduled to fish would be showing up the following morning. We were scheduled to start the trip at 8 a.m., however, the weather report was calling for rain staring around noon on a charter scheduled to last until 2 p.m.

When I arrived the next mooring at the Little Susitna River Public Use Facility boat launch, the river was at what I would characterize as a high king salmon season water level, however, there appeared to be close to 18 inches of visibility, so I felt confident there would be numbers places where the guests could fish with a reasonable chance of catching a few coho salmon during the trip.

My first stop was at a place where a small tributary of clearer water dumped into the murkier Little Susitna River. I gave my guests a quick demonstration of how I wanted them to fish weighted #4 and #5 spinners in and around the clear water lens of water dumping into the river.

If was a small lease of clear water, I had the two men cast and retrieve in that small area for at least 15 minutes to get a feel for how and where to cast the lures, and also how to present the lures as slow as possible, while still keeping them working and just above the river bottom.

After the guests had developed a feel for casting the spinners and presenting them with my boat rods, which were likely somewhat different than anything they had used before, I pulled the anchor and started rowing the boat against the current, as we slowly fished a section oof slow water that extended for about a quarter mile. One of the guests briefly hooked a ooho salmon soon after we started moving downriver in the boat, however, the fish shook loose almost immediately.. As we moved along with them casting into the slow water along the bank, we saw a couple more salmon surface (including one just upstream from us in an area they had just fished through.

Such salmon behavior (while not striking the lure) is what I often refer to as the salmon giving us and our lures, “The fin.”

Although we only saw a limited number of salmon surfacing during the trip, we were to get that same “Fin-flipping” treatment in about half of the 13 or so stretches the guests fished during the trip. One of my guests did manage to catch a coho salmon on a #5 spinner, however, in the 3 stretch of river they were casting into as I rowed the boat down the shallower side of the river. It was a very dark salmon which they quickly photographed in the net before I turned it loose.

Their lures were equipped with one half-inch gap single hook, so the releases were easy, and there did not appear to be any fish hooked deep or bleeding when released. One long section, which produced several coho near the end of the drift, in water normally too shallow to hold fish, produced 60% of all the coho they caught during the trip, with 4 additional spots producing one coho each. All of the fish they hooked, including the 10 coho they caught, were quite dark.

There did not appear to be any great abundance of salmon in the entire 8-mile stretch of river the guests fished, and I suspect the only reason they managed catch as many salmon as they did, was partially because we did not see anyone else fishing along the river during the entire trip.

My impressions that there did not appear to be any siflificqant abundance of coho or other salmon still around, likely confirming the low weir counts measured a few additional mile upriver throughout the entire 2025 season.

At the boat launch, before we departed there were 5 other boat trailers, which I suspected were all hunting parties spread out along the river. During our trip we saw some boats that appeared to me to perhaps be Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) staff members perhaps venturing upstream to remove the weir for the season. I later learned that to indeed be what they were attempting, although the river was high enough that they did not totally get the weir removed. With the staff members deciding to wait until the water had dropped further to facilitate and ease the process of fully removing the weir. Through Tuesday September 9, the final salmon counts from Little Susitna River Weir were: 4,506 coho / 10,788 chum / 643 sockeye / 982 pink / and 69 Chinook (most of the 2025 Chinook return likely passed upriver before the weir was fully installed and fish tight on July 23).

In a conversation this week I learned ADF&G had counted approximately 470 spawning Chinook (king) salmon during an aerial survey conducted in July.

I enjoyed one last salmon charter with two out of state visitors during their last day in Alaska, however, after they caught only coho salmon during the trip, and with each fish having developed dark spawning hues, I decided this would be my final Mat-Su salmon charter for ocean-run fish during 2025. The day I was writing this column, (September 16), I had another group of visitors inquiring about fishing for salmon the next day.

Sorry, I can not help, it is time to let the salmon spawn (and plan for next year).

Fish On!