Fall for the salmon angler in Alaska usually mean two things: silver salmon and rain. When you get a cloudy, dry, and only slightly windy day some might opt to stay inside. For an angler, these conditions signal a great day on the water. Today we ventured up one of the many Alaskan glacial-fed rivers to try our hand at some fresh Coho salmon ever-so-rightly dubbed Silver salmon. Though they are not as big as a King, they sure do fight like one.
Silver salmon, like the rest of their salmon family, enter rivers in big schools with the tide. Once in the river, their sometimes several hundred mile journey to their spawning grounds begins. Amazingly, salmon return to the same rivers they were born. Each year, many normally quiet rivers turn into some of the best pacific salmon fisheries in the world. Silver salmon fishing is a particularly bright spot for salmon anglers due to their fighting abilities and knack for biting roe, hardware, and, my personal favorite, flies. Non-stop action is common during the peak of the run. Oh, and they don’t taste too bad either.
Many of the glacial-fed rivers, like the one we were on today, are so silty and muddy that visibility is virtually non-existent. Silvers suffer from these conditions and they will hold up in areas where clear water meet silty water so they can let their gills clear again before moving on. These contrasting water clarity areas are commonly found in eddies. Avoiding the technical jargon of fluid dynamics, eddies are typically referred to by fisherman as areas along the edge of the river with no current or even current that moves slightly in the opposite direction. Eddies are a salmon hot spot. Salmon love to move through eddies because it is easier than moving through fast water. Both eddies and clear/silty water create what some might call a silver mine. We searched for silver mines and found great success, even with a fly.
Today culminated into a good day where we had stretches of excellent fishing followed by long periods of minimal action. Though we all left with fish, we knew this area has much more to offer in the near future. It is hard to describe a day of silver fishing, or any fishing for that matter, anything short of excellent especially when you get to spend it with a couple of buddies and a couple of beers (okay, maybe a few more than that). We all knew we would be back soon.