* August 15th Craig, Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on August 15th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed Our guests have experienced mostly sunny skies and flat calm seas here for the past week. If only that would last another week, as it looks like the rain and wind are descending upon us again here in Craig. With plenty of islands to hide behind I’m sure we’ll find a kelp bed or three to hunker down next to. The furnaces are fueled up on the boats and we’re ready to roll! Fishing has been great for silvers and we’re still picking up a few king salmon in the mix. Keeper size chicken halibut have been easy to come by and so have slot limit ling cod, yelloweye, and black sea bass. Calm seas definitely help in that department! With 8 to 10 foot seas forecast for our next group arriving this afternoon we will likely have to work a lot harder for bottomfish. Here’s Trent, Eric, Trevor, and Eric from Lynden, WA with a fine catch of silvers, halibut, sea bass, and a keeper ling cod from a few days ago.
Big Mike caught this 30# yelloweye rockfish on a pipe jig while working a rockpile in search of ling cod a couple days back. It’s easily the biggest yelloweye I’ve ever seen.
Barry Dikeman caught this 250 pound-ish halibut while aboard the Makai with Capt. Troy Thain. We’ve had at least half a dozen more large halibut in the 70 to 250 pound range released between the Sea Hunt, Makai, and Polar Bear this past week.
I’ve always posted these fishing reports to give upcoming customers a hint of what’s in store for them on their upcoming trip and to let prospective customers know that we’re still kicking here in Craig. I only with I had more time to post more photos and videos here, as I know all of you enjoy seeing your photos here. I’ve been recording quite a few more GoPro videos and will upload them as I have time towards the end of the season. Just three more groups and we’ll be done here in Craig. My how this incredible fishing season has flown by! Until next week…good fishing! Capt. Rob Endsley * August 7th Craig, Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on August 7th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed It’s been a week since my last report here from Craig, Alaska and things are much the same as they were in late July. The silvers seem to be coming in pulses and one day all the boats in our small fleet will get early limits and then the next day we’re scrambling to find them again. The boats that are sticking-and-staying and picking away at the silvers for most of the morning are getting limits just about every day though. The king salmon run is beginning to slow down, which isn’t unusual for this time of year. Kind of like the silvers, if you you stick it out and target kings all day long there’s a great chance of getting a nice limit of king salmon. Run around and try to get a mixed bag of species and you might miss out in the king salmon bite though. Some big boys have been caught this past week, as I’ve heard of 56 and 60 pound kings hitting the dock at a local lodge. We’ve been opting for silvers the last few days and have been picking up one or two king salmon a day incidentally mixed in with the silver salmon. I fished kings hard with our group from Yakima, WA a few days back and we had one really solid day of king salmon fishing, boating limits of kings to the low 30’s and losing a few more. The grade of halibut has been excellent lately with quick limits of nice chicken halibut in the ocean. We’ve also been targetting some big sea bass on the offshore pinnacles and getting nice limits of these great eating fish. Good yelloweye and ling cod fishing for the boats that have made the effort. Here’s a few pics from this past week of fishing in Craig, Alaska: The Mildfelts and Billy Vernon pose for the glory dock shot with king salmon to 30 pounds, limits of silvers, halibut, and black sea bass.
Jeff didn’t need to hold these black sea bass waaaaaay out in front to make them look big. They WERE big!
Ryan with his 27 pound king salmon from the Tree Hole off the north end of Noyes Island.
Capt. Troy Thain aboard the Makai nets a nice king salmon for Mike at Cape Ulitka yesterday afternoon.
This humpback whale put on quite the show at the Tree Hole late yesterday afternoon. We sat and watched this young whale breach around the charter boats for about 30 minutes.
We’re in silver salmon mode now and hopefully we get another good shot of them here soon. Until next week…good fishing to you! Capt. Rob Endsley * July 29th Craig, Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on July 30th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed Limits of both king and silver salmon were easy to come by here up until about three or four days ago in Craig, Alaska. Fishing is still good for both…just not the stupid salmon action that’s been spoiling us most of the summer. Our guests that spend some time targetting king salmon are finding limits on a near daily basis and we’ve had 42 and 48 pound king salmon hit the dock this past week. The silver salmon fishing remains what I would call decent, with the four boats in our small fleet getting anywhere from a half a limit per day to full limits. It seems like few of the hatchery silvers are pushing into the islands from the Klawock Hatchery and hopefully that run continues to build. There seems to be a little gap in the silver run right now and we’re all hopeful that another push will come in headed for the hatchery. We’ve been blasting offshore to catch our limits of chicken halibut and picking up a few nice sea bass, yelloweye, and ling cod while we’re out there. The pipe jigs that dad and I made two years ago continue to produce the most halibut bites of anything we drop over the side. The things really work! Here’s Lester Surgener from Bakersfield, CA with his 48 pound king salmon from last week. He caught it with Capt. Kim aboard the Sea Hunt. Kim has been on a king salmon tear lately! My dad, John Endsley, and his buddies Frank, Joe, and Paul with a limit of nice king salmon from the last day of their trip (yesterday). It’s sure nice to fish with pops and the rest of the guys up here in Alaska!
Here’s a great link to a weather cam here in Craig…courtesy of Nancie and Ron Wilder who visited us in early July. Sorry…no new videos to upload with all this rain and wind we’ve been experiencing lately. It looks like the weather is going to calm down in a couple of days and I’ll bust out the GoPro camera again when it does. Good fishing! Captain Rob Endsley * July 19th Southeast Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on July 20th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed The silvers came pouring into the waters around Craig in big numbers around a week ago and we’ve been getting limits or near limits every day since. The fish are averaging 5 to 10 pounds right now and we’ve had some wide open action mooching cut plug herring for these scrappy fish. There’s also still plenty of king salmon available at all the usual haunts. There’s been a few fish in the 40’s and one of the charters from Klawock brought in a whopping 58 pounder yesterday. I would imagine there will be a few more fish like that in the next few weeks. Here’s a few pics from this past week. These are just a very few of all of the great fish that have hit our dock. Steve Maris with a limit of yelloweye rockfish and ling cod.
The Holt family with limits of nice king salmon from Prince of Wales Island. I grew up with these guys…man the stories.
Judy and just one of her king salmon. Capt. Rafael described her as the “sweetest lady ever”. All that good karma bodes well on the fishing grounds for Judy and husband Joe!
Last but not least here’s a couple of Alaska fishing videos from the GoPro video camera to wet your whistle. King Salmon Recorded by the Stam Cam Silver Salmon Fishing in Craig, Alaska The salmon and halibut fishing has been outstanding here this summer and these videos are just a brief sampling of what Craig, Alaska has to offer. Come and join us here in Alaska one of these days! Captain Rob Endsley * July 11th Southeast Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on July 12th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed King salmon fishing has remained very good here in Craig, Alaska this past week and the silver salmon fishing seems to be getting a little better with every day. Most of the really good fishing has been occurring outside of Noyes Island and a few fish are coming out of the islands. Spotty weather kept us off the ocean earlier last week and once we got back out there we found plenty of king salmon biting. Rumors of a few king salmon in the 30’s and 40’s from yesterday and I’m sure it won’t be long before someone bags up a big bruiser in the 50 plus pound range out there. Here’s Nancie Wilder and husband Ron with her low 20’s king salmon from last week. Most of the king salmon here have been running in the 15 to 25 pound range lately. These fish will tear you up on light mooching tackle. Fun stuff!
Dave Allan was lucky enough to bag this 36 1/2 inch halibut on the last day of his trip here in Craig. The Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife requires all halibut over 37 inches be released aboard charter vessels in Southeast Alaska this year. Hopefully these regulations will help to rebuild the halibut stocks. Legal halibut have been easy to come by this summer.
Brothers Dave and Greg caught ling cod that were identical twins measuring 39 1/2 inches. They had a $20 bet on the biggest bottomfish and it would have been a tie but Greg’s fish gacked up a good sized rockfish just before we weighed them. Dave’s fish weighed 22 pounds and Greg’s weighed 21 1/2 pound after losing the rockfish. One of several funny stories on this trip and thankfully this one didn’t involve me : )
And here’s a couple more Alaskan salmon fishing videos recorded with the GoPro video camera I have mounted on the charter boat. It’s raw unedited video and you just never know what might happen when I turn the camera on: Mooching for King Salmon in Southeast Alaska Salmon Fishing in Craig, Alaska Looking forward to more great fishing here in Craig this coming week. We’re looking for that first big push of silvers any day now! Captain Rob Endsley * Craig, Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on July 1st, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed King salmon fishing has been rock solid here in Craig, Alaska this past week. On some days we’ve gotten into totally wide open king salmon bites and on others we work a little harder for some quality fish. Regardless, it’s been a great ride here this past month for king salmon! There are few places on the west coast where you can mooch cut plug herring the way it’s done here in Craig and have so much opportunity to catch multiple species. It’s hand’s on fishing…you feel the bite, you set the hook, and you fight the fish! Here’s magician’s John Walton and Doug Bennett with their first ever king salmon. Hope to see these guys back here again!
Craig, Alaska veterans Sally and Craig Kvam with Sally’s 35 pound Chinook. Our local Trooper was even kind enough to record her catch on her license for her. Good stuff!
Dale, Craig, Dustin, and Vince with a nice limit of king salmon. We had three great days of fishing with these guys.
Dustin finished the trip with this 30 pound Tyee!
And Papa Vince took the group jackpot with this upper 30’s king salmon.
Here’s a couple of videos from the new GoPro video camera I added to the charter boat this summer. I’ve turned it on a few more times and will get the videos loaded as I have time. King Salmon Fishing with the GoPro The big boys are starting to come in off the ocean the last few days. I’ve heard of two 40’s, a 45, 47, and 49 pound Chinook the last three days and I’m sure it won’t be long before someone tops the 50 pound mark. July is the month for hawg kings around here and I think we’re going to see a bunch of trophy class king salmon coming out of these waters this year! The silver salmon have been trickling in here for a couple weeks now and by the looks of thing we could see some great silver fishing in July. I’ll report back in another week! Captain Rob Endsley * King Salmon Fishing Remains Strong!Posted on June 19th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed The numbers of king salmon seem to have fallen slightly here this past week from the wide open action we had in early June. Overall the king salmon fishing remains very strong here now though and fish are spread out in quite a few areas. The weather and ocean conditions has been nothing short of spectacular! Mike Campbell from Lowrance electronics scored this 44 pound Chinook a few days ago aboard the Polar Bear. It’s the biggest king we’ve seen so far, though we’ve heard of at least king larger. Nice work Mike!
Bob DeLong and gang experienced flat calm seas and great fishing the last three days. We got on some good king bites and picked up easy limits of legal chicken halibut offshore every day. Looking forward to seeing Mike, Jeff, Jim, and Bob again next year!
Captain Rob Endsley * June 6th Craig, Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on June 7th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed My apologies for not getting a report up sooner. We don’t have internet service yet and won’t have it for another week or so. King salmon fishing has been nothing short of spectacular here in Craig, Alaska for the past couple of weeks. We’ve been having so much fun mooching cut plug herring that we haven’t even broken out the new Cannon downriggers yet! Here’s a few pics from the last week of fishing: Jim “Bucket” Heins with a mid-30’s “Tyree” that he released. The Canucks have Tyee’s…we have “Tyree’s”
Michael Parker with one of the typical king salmon we’ve been seeing here lately.
David Garst and Madeline Mair from West Virginia with a pair of king salmon. West Virginia…thus the “Tyree”…I like it!
Parker with a beauty of a king salmon
Jim with our first silver of the summer. Here’s a couple of killer trip reports from forums in the Pacific Northwest! The Outdoor Line http://forum.theoutdoorline.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=438 Piscatorial Pursuits http://www.piscatorialpursuits.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/686742/1/Report_SE_AK_POW_Island.html Thanks for checking in and don’t forget to give us a shout at 888-943-4746 to plan your Alaskan king salmon fishing vacation! Captain Rob Endsley * Strong King Salmon Run Forecast for SE Alaska!Posted on April 26th, 2011 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed  We should see more days like this in 2011! The Alaska Department of Fish and Game just released a Chinook Abundance Index for Southeast Alaska of 1.69, the highest Chinook forecast since 2007. What exactly does that mean? It means there’s going to be plenty of king salmon around this summer for us to catch! With this high forecast comes a higher possession limit for non-resident anglers of 5 Chinook for the year in Southeast Alaska. Non-resident anglers can retain two Chinook per day in the month of May until the possession limit is reached and one per day from June thru September. This is great news and while we’ve had pretty darned good king salmon fishing the last couple of years, we’re excited to see the return of some “good-old-days” king salmon fishing to Craig and Southeast Alaska. Will someone catch a 70 plus pounder this year in Craig? That lucky angler could be you! Captain Rob Endsley * August 27th Craig, Alaska Fishing ReportPosted on August 28th, 2010 by . Click Here to get this RSS Feed My big, fancy Nikon camera went kapuuut shortly after our last report on August 5th. I’ve taken a few shots since with a Nikon Coolpix and luckily we’ve gotten some additional awesome shots from guests to use here. Our August salmon fishery has been about as goofy as it gets. One day we’re on the silvers and doing well and the next they are few and far between. Luckily we got a good shot of king salmon in the middle of August to keep us going. The Ram Construction group that joins us every year had some exceptional king salmon fishing offshore during their stay here the first week of August. A calm ocean allowed us to roam around and we had some great fishing, with limits of king salmon to 27 pounds and some decent coho action mixed in. Ram’s owner, Mike Hammes, snapped up the 200 pound halibut in the photo below on a 16 ounce glow-in-the-dark scampi tail jig. The battle was a total rodeo and lasted nearly an hour. It was Mike’s biggest halibut to date and he grabbed the Ram halibut jackpot that usually belongs to Stu Heaton. Good times!
The Candini’s were the next to join us and they jumped right in with some wide open king salmon action on their first morning. We tripled up on big Chinook immediately, losing one of them after a brief battle and getting solid hooks into the other two. While those two fish were screaming around the bay Chris kept bombing bait at the school and missing bites. He did everything text book and they just wouldn’t stick. No biggy! Finally I had to spin the boat around to keep one of the fish from running into the kelp and we lost the school. After a great battle Jerry and Milo landed their kings, 27 and 39 pounders. I had some great photos of their kings, but unfortunately they went bye-bye when my camera went down. Sorry guys! We slid offshore in the fog and Chris drove the hook home on a 20 pound king salmon within five minutes. The bite was on and we were getting bit repeatedly, but the combination of a six foot swell and pea soup fog drove us back into calmer waters. No problemo…we managed to grab a quick limit of chicken halibut on the way in. Below is a photo of Milo with the 30 pound chicken halibut he caught on an 18 ounce pipe jig tipped with salmon belly. He’s always smilin’…
The Kvam’s and the Quades were on tap next and got to experience some outstanding salmon action. We hit Hole in the Wall on their first morning and caught four or five coho before Sally hooked into a 30 pound king salmon. She landed the fish after a great battle under sunny skies. After the bite died we diddled around at Roller Bay, hooking a handful of fat silvers, a bunch of sea bass, and a limit of halibut. The ocean was relatively flat the next day, so we blasted well offshore to an area another charter captain said was holding a good mess of silver salmon. We were the only boat in the area and it didn’t take long to find the fish. We hooked around 30 silvers in two hours and landed half of them before the tide turned the bite off. Amidst all the chaos Kathryn layed into a king salmon that ran off 400 feet of line out of the gate. We chased the fish on glassy calm seas and she landed it 25 minutes later, an identical 30 pound Chinook to Sally’s. This was Kathryn’s first time salmon fishing and well, she was hooked! We ran back to this area again the next morning and the silvers were still jumping on like crazy. Our first drift produced twelve hookups and while we only landed four of them…who cares…we were having a ball! The schools would come and go and every other drift would produce wide open action with silvers running all over the place. Ms. Nicole also joined us for the day and when it was all said and done we landed 27 silvers and lost just about as many. Fun stuff! On the way home we dropped on an offshore rockpile and cranked up a mess of ling cod on pipe jigs and scampi tails. Sally’s 30 pound king salmon
Kathryn’s first king salmon is a 30 pound beauty! We took some time to go cave-hopping while we were there, pulling the charter boat into two massive caves full of puffins and other nesting sea birds. Awesome!
Strong winds forced us inside the islands for a couple days on our last rotation of the summer, the Webb and Mihalic groups. Salmon fishing was slow, slow, slow and after several hours of “watching the paint dry” we decided to torment some sea bass and halibut. The Webb group, fishing on the Polar Bear, got nice limits of sea bass and three of their four chicken halibut messing around in the islands. We ran back towards town at the end of the day to look for signs of salmon and after actually hooking up on two silvers Neal’s salmon rod doubles over with a huge halibut. An hour and another rodeo later we landed the 160 pound beast and the guys were all smiles. In Alaska you just never know what’s going to happen!
Here’s Neal hooked up on yet another strange sea creature, this time a huge octopus.
Greg holds up the big yelloweye that he caught fishing aboard the Siketi with Capt. Mike Hailey. The guys had a great time fishing with Mike, catching a mixed bag of just about everything in the sea.
After four days aboard the Siketi with Capt. Mike I was lucky enough to take Greg, Tom, John, and Ted on my last charter of the summer. Nice group of guys from Colorado that fished with us for 5 days. Here’s Tom with his first saltwater king salmon.
Check out the teeth marks on Gregs silver salmon. All of our salmon on this particular day were gashed up with teeth marks…salmon sharks!
A few play days for us before we pack up everything and head back to Washington for the winter. Even though our fishing here in Craig, Alaska was a roller coaster ride this summer we still had a great time, had many memorable experiences, and look forward to seeing you all back here again sometime. Rob Endsley |
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