At Alaska West we have the incredible opportunity to host a handful of guests each day on the Arolik River – a pristine, totally undeveloped river a few miles from our camp that was tailor made for rainbow trout fishing. Arolik rainbows are like no others. Here’s why we love ’em. Each one is different….
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Search Results for: big fish
Rigging Stinger Hooks
Tube flies and stinger hooks are very popular with anglers who chase salmon and steelhead with fly rods, for a few reasons. They allow you to change your hook without changing your fly. They allow you to fish a big fly without fishing a hook with a long shank, which helps you land more fish….
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Don’t Forget About Me
Folks who are headed up to Alaska West in 12 days for the start of our season get pretty fired up about the early season king fishing – it’s all the rage. Don’t forget though – rainbow trout live in the Kanektok and the Arolik too, they’re available all season long, and they’re pretty awesome…
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Larimer’s Reverse Marabou Tube Fly
One of Tom Larimer’s go-to flies these days for winter steelhead, summer steelhead and king salmon in Alaska is one of his own designs – the Reverse Marbou Tube. NOTE: If you’re viewing this in a newsletter or a reader, click here to hear Tom talk about his steelhead and salmon fly on YouTube. The…
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Sage DXL Typhoon Boat Bag Review
Sage has recently released a new line of bags and packs they call their ‘DXL Typhoon’ series. We’ve written up their large waist pack in the past – we liked it. The past couple of weeks we’ve gotten a chance to play with the DXL Typhoon Boat Bag, and we think it’s pretty darned cool….
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Seams and Backeddies
In a typical river float with Chile West, anglers have the opportunity to fish lots of different types of water using many methods. Occasionally there will be an area where the river dumps into a rock wall and makes a 90 degree turn creating a big backeddy. Here the current swirls around creating seams that…
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Stop Your Backcast High
One of the biggest casting mistakes made on the saltwater flats is the dreaded ‘dropping of the backcast’. We all do it from time to time…but it sure screws things up when we do. Dropping your backcast happens most often in an effort to add distance to a cast, and the effect is quite the…
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Salmon Recipe from Jim Palmersheim
Today we continue our series of recipes from our team at Alaska West – a bunch of folks who get the chance to partake in beautiful fresh wild salmon quite a lot in the course of a summer… Jim Palmersheim quickly became a fan favorite on our guide staff a few years back. Not only…
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Trevor Covich’s Streamer Rig
Trevor Covich has been working at Alaska West since he was in diapers. Well, close. These days Trevor splits his time between guiding at Alaska West and guiding at Chile West. Trevor loves fishing streamers for big trout in Chile, and today we present, in detail, the rig that Trevor uses when doing just that….
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Selecting Steelhead Flies
In the past month we’ve had Tom Larimer stop by our blog to give a 6-minute master class on spey casting anchor placement, and a 1-minute diatribe (well, for Tom it was a diatribe) on fishing your fly actively. Today we hear Tom’s thoughts on picking which steelhead fly to fish – especially which color to…
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