One of the things that attracts people to fly fishing is the creative aspect of it. This is seen in fly presentation, line modification, rod building and more, but the most common sign of creativity shows up in someone’s flies – or sometimes lack of flies. One of our long time friends here at Alaska…
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Tips
5 Ways to Avoid Tangles in Your Running Line
One of the most frustrating things about fishing with any kind of shooting head system (spey casting Skagit heads comes to mind) is the tangling that inevitably, occasionally, happens in your running line. You make what was otherwise a beautiful cast, it stops suddenly way short of its target, you say some bad words, and…
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Tying Sculpins with Trevor Covich
Trevor Covich is a long-time member of the Deneki family. Over the years he’s developed some pretty sweet sculpin patterns, and he’s here today in video form to show you just how to tie ’em! This is 20+ minutes of detail straight from the horse’s mouth – if you like to tie, grab yourself a…
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Silver Salmon Popper by Chuck Shepard
The silver salmon fishing is hot up at Alaska West this time of the year, and these fish are really aggressive towards the fly. Stripping a fly below the surface creates a jigging action that is hard for a Silver to resist, but one method that is often over looked is targeting them on the…
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Easy to Swap Leaders
If you’re bouncing around a river swinging flies for steelhead or salmon, you’re probably going to need to swap sinktips every once in a while. You’re hopefully not making a change every 20 minutes, but when you move from a ripping boulder garden to a glassy tailout, you need to make a change. Today’s tip…
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How to Fillet Salmon
Speed Fillets We fillet a lot of fish at Alaska West. We allow our guests to take home up to 50 pounds of fish that they catch during their week with us. We vacuum pack and freeze all of the fish before it’s boxed up and sent with the angler on the flight home. The…
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Landing Steelhead – Try Upstream!
Time for more steelhead fishing wisdom from Scott Baker-McGarva, head guide at BC West! Go Upstream Sometimes when you leave an angler for a bit, you return only to see them struggling with a fish close to shore, (sometimes you need to leave the client to improve their mojo and fish attraction) and many will…
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Adjusting the Swing
Fred Telleen has been guiding on the Kenai River since 1989. He also hosts groups at Alaska West during our king salmon fishing season. Fred put together some thoughts on gear and swing techniques after his trip this year – experienced anglers in particular are going to like today’s post. Make sure you check out…
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Flats Fishing and Humility
Conversations About First-Time Flats Fishing When we talk to guests about their first flats fishing trip to Andros South, we always get a lot of questions about angling skill. “Is it really that hard to see bonefish?” “How far do I have to cast?” “What about casting in the wind?” So we explain that the…
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13 Habits of Unaccomplished Anglers
Last week we ran an article called 13 Habits of Highly Effective Anglers. It somehow wound up pretty popular – thanks to the 4,882 of you who have checked it out so far! Our good friend Kirk Werner has a fantastic blog called the Unaccomplished Angler. We were thrilled when Kirk agreed to put together…
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