Author: Kodie Kowitz

For the last few weeks of season, we spent the majority of our time targeting rainbow trout on the swing using a two handed spey rod with streamers.

The weather can be a questionable factor this time of year as we enter the fall season. There was a few days where we were breaking ice off of guides and while those days made for some slower trout fishing, it didnt take long for the bite to turn back around. 

It seemed like the colder days produced a morning and/or an evening bite and was fairly quiet in between. Overall, we had great success targeting trout on the swing our last couple weeks of season and we had some fantastic days that produced high numbers of trophy rainbow trout through out the day.

We spent the majority of our days fishing the Naknek for trophy trout as the salmon have spawned out of the smaller streams. 

This fishing just reminds us of why the Naknek is largely considered the best rainbow trout fishing in all of Alaska.

Early September still produced some good Silver Salmon fishing.

This time frame can also provide fantastic rainbow trout and dolly varden fishing in Katmai National Park and Becharof wilderness. 

Arctic Char are also showing up in a couple remote locations across Bristol Bay. Arctic Char are normally low numbers fish and worked hard for. The work usually pay big rewards as the average fish is high 20″ and 30″ plus fish aren’t uncommon. 

It’s a Pink Salmon year and the numbers of them entering the river is insane. You can catch as many of pinks as you could possibly ever want to in a day and THEN SOME. It’s impossible to have a slow day of salmon fishing when the pinks are here!

The Silver run didn’t last as long as it normally does and the numbers weren’t as high as last year but clients are still hooking limits. Whether they’re fishing flies or gear.

The rainbow trout fishing on the main river is a bit slower in the first couple of weeks as our clients are focused on wanting to target salmon on the Naknek and fill their fish boxes to take home. 

The last couple of weeks of August the sockeye are full spawn, beads and flesh flies both became extremely effective. Trophy rainbow trout are being caught daily.  

We are using these techniques now on the smaller streams throughout the Katmai and Becharof wilderness. These trips are mostly fly out, where we are catching high numbers of dolly varden, rainbow trout and grayling.

July gave us the largest in bay sockeye salmon run in history. In a world where everyone always likes to get stuck on doom and gloom it’s great to see a fishery doing better than ever. 

King Salmon fishing started strong with good numbers on both fly rods and conventional gear. As the season continued, numbers slowed down making it a below average year overall. We believe a major factor was the incredibly high rainfall and waters we had during the king season-making them difficult to target.

Rainbow trout fishing was steady throughout the month. July is a fantastic for a variety of fishing styles. Multiple species can be caught by streamers, mousing, dryfly, bead fishing, nymphing and even spey fishing. The big rivers and small creeks are all fishing really well.

Grayling were plentiful in several of the small streams we do on fly out trips. 

The pike fishing was also excellent.

As always our season opened with the June 8th rainbow trout opener. Our first week produced some excellent rainbow trout fishing with trophy fish coming to hand most days. 

Mid June gave us some very solid dryfly fishing for both rainbow trout and grayling. A few surprisingly large rainbow trout were tamed on small dry flies. 

Late June begins with the start of the world’s largest Salmon runs. King Salmon are the first to show followed closely by the Sockeye Salmon. We also found some fantastic rainbow trout and Northern Pike when taking a break from salmon fishing.