We talk a lot about spey fishing here on our blog. That’s because it’s one of our favorite ways to fish moving water for species like salmon, steelhead, or even trout. When we refer to ‘spey fishing,’ the vast majority of the time we’re referring to skagit-style spey casting. That’s the preferred method for most…
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Search Results for: King Salmon
Share Your Fishing Stories
Have you joined us at one of our lodges? Do you have a particularly great fishing story? If so, we want to hear it! We’re fortunate to witness a lot of unbelievable fishing stories through the eyes of our guests. Unfortunately, we’re not able to put all of them in words. That’s why we love…
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Greg Houska’s ‘Kriller’ at the Fly Fishing Shop
A while back we told you that our friends at Aqua Flies had begun producing a commercial version of the ‘Kriller‘ – a salmon/steelhead fly developed by Alaska West guide, Greg Houska, that certainly proved itself last season on our Kanektok king, chum, and silver salmon populations. We’re happy to report that the good folks…
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Happy Halloween
Corpses, zombies, rotting flesh, skeletons.. While that might sound like October 31st to most, that sounds more like August in our neck of the woods. Each summer, towards to end of our season at Alaska West, thousands upon thousands of salmon complete their life cycle, littering the banks in an image that more closely resembles…
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Advanced Bead Fishing for Trout: Matching the Hatch
Salmon eggs make up a huge portion of the diet for our Alaskan rainbow trout, which is why bead fishing is arguably one of the most effective means of targeting trout with a fly rod in our neck of the woods. However, contrary to popular belief, fishing beads for trout can be extremely technical, going…
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Get Down with Glass Beads
Today we present you with a quick, easy, and sexier way of adding weight to streamers.. Glass beads! We throw a lot of streamers over the course of the summer for our aggressive Alaskan trout, and contrary to popular belief, they eat them all summer long! That’s right, even during the height of the salmon…
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Timeless Tips: 4 Ways to Fish Dries in Alaska
Everybody loves fishing dry flies. There’s just nothing that beats the excitement of a surface take. In Western Alaska we fish dry flies quite a lot, but the vast majority of the time they’re about as far as you can get from a traditional “match the hatching insect” dry fly program. Here are 4 ways…
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The Starlight Leech – Tying Instructions
Silver season is upon us, and while silver salmon might not be known as overly finicky in our parts, many salmon anglers would agree that when it comes to fly selection, one pattern in particular reigns supreme – The Starlight Leech. What makes it so effective? Well, we wrote an entire blog post on that…
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Nymphing with Indicators – 5 tips
It’s August, and in our neck of the woods that means our rainbow trout, dolly varden, and Arctic grayling populations are keying in heavily on the conveyor belt of salmon eggs and flesh making its way down river. Therefore, fishing sub-surface is the name of the game this time of year, and with that, like…
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Fighting Fish – Pull With the Rod, Gain With the Reel
Our ridiculous run of silver salmon has just begun to show up in full force, which means alongside four other species of pacific salmon, including voracious chums and feisty pinks, there’s no shortage of practice for fighting big fish. One thing we see on a regular basis from our first-time anglers upon hooking a hefty…
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