Originally Published The Reel News January 2012
Southeast Alaska
On The Hunt for Hallies In Glacier Bay National Park
We tackle terrorizing dollies in kelp, icy silvers in the strait
and barndoors in ice bergs on an fishing adventure surrounded by
sea otters, whales and spectacular 15,000-foot mountains.
Southeast Alaska
On The Hunt for Hallies In Glacier Bay National Park
We tackle terrorizing dollies in kelp, icy silvers in the strait
and barndoors in ice bergs on an fishing adventure surrounded by
sea otters, whales and spectacular 15,000-foot mountains.
By Terry W. Sheely
Up through the hull and out in the mist and streamers of fog wetting the stony face of Point Adolphus we hear the whales singing, the musical jingling of small waves sifting through pea gravel beaches, lapping and heaving through acres of brown kelp.
And then we hear IT--a wet explosion of baitfish crazy with fear, leaping out of the water, scattering into dark swirls, disappearing in panics of flashing predators. Jim looks at Jim and I look for the spinning rod. We’d ghosted into the kelp intending to jig live herring for fresh salmon and halibut baits but that idea vaporized in the chaos of game fish blowing up around the boat.
Clouds of little needlefish are erupting on the surface, flopping on the kelp, thrashing for their lives. Jim hurls a nickel-plated Krocodile spoon into a frothy eruption, cranks twice and comes up hard against almost two feet of twisting, thrashing Dolly Varden char. Seconds later I’ve got a catapulting pink salmon on a bent Ugly Stik spinning rod, Skipper Jim is into another Dolly, the boat is drifting, bait is boiling, whales blowing and it’s starting to get a little bit crazy on the north end of Southeast Alaska’s Chichagof Island.
With or without the calving glaciers, acres of bobbing sea otters, sculpted ice bergs, crooning humpbacks, the “best gourmet pizza in Southeast,” bucket-dipped baitfish and backyard black bear this salmon and halibut trip is turning into an Alaskan adventure.
It started last July when TRN Publisher/Editor Jim Goerg and I arrived in Juneau on Alaska Air Flight 51 from Seattle. We jumped over to Flight 71, a 737-400 for the 13-minute one-flight-daily hop to the curious little community of Gustavus.
Minutes later we’re standing in the puddles surrounded by Glacier Bay National Park wondering which face in the airport confusion is JimKearns. Jim and Julene Kearns are our hosts for the next couple of days of fishing and exploration from a base at their Fairweather Adventures at Glacier Bay in the landlocked community of Gustavus. The Kearns’ operation is a combination bed & breakfast and guide operation with Jim running a 26-foot Sea Dory for halibut, salmon and explorations into Glacier Bay National Park (GBNP). The park is a remnant of the Little Ice Age, a United Nations Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage site. It is one of this country’s largest and most ruggedly spectacular parks and strangely one of its least known and certainly lightest fished.
Gustavus is a scattered community of 450 with a jet port, no roads to the outside no downtown, and a populace of self-reliant Alaskans, almost all working to nail a piece of the tourism business. The town is surrounded by park and Tongass National Forest and is so scattered that it’s tough to imagine 450 people in the trees and fireweed patches.
Houses are plopped into spruce thickets, with acres of elbow room and privacy. Old boats grow hard-scrabble flower and vegetable gardens along gravel driveways that disappear into the trees. Moose tracks are common. There’s a Mobil Gas station with Pegasus flying off the roof and 1950s bubble pumps. The Gustavus Mall is a house and it's for sale.
The town declares itself the “the doorway” to GBNP and Gustavus Road ends in the parking lot at park headquarters in Bartlett Cove. More than 400,000 tourists dip into the national park every year almost all on cruise ships. Few stop to fish. Despite that oversight, the word that Gustavus is a salmon and hallie hot spot is gaining traction. Eight charter operators are now based here, plus a handful of small boat and walk-in fishing guides and most keep busy all summer. Twice that many B&Bs and lodges are available, and down on Dolly Varden Road a small operation called Pep’s Packing is run by a ball of energy named Pep who processes, freezes, ships, smokes and packs fish for the trip out.
The community is located north of Chichagof Island on the shoreline of Icy Strait at the southern edge of GBNP, under the ice encrusted Fairweather Range and the imposing 15,300 feet of Mount Fairweather.
History is new here. The very earth that supports this community was scraped flat and bared by retreating glaciers and melting ice fields. The land under Gustavus is elevating two inches a year, we’re told, as it decompresses from the incalculable weight of glacial ice that buried it for eons.
Now covered with conifers and marsh grass this place was still under ice as recently as when George Vancouver was mapping the West Coast for the British and some folks in New England were thinking about independence.
Pass-by surges of salmon, kings and silvers, humpies and chum, come and go down the corridor of Icy Strait and when they’re here the salmon fishing is memorable bordering on outrageous. But it’s the halibut that put this place on the bucket list. Fifty pounders are routine, 80 pounders expected, 100 pounders not unexpected and 300 pounders possible. In two days of fishing Jim and I each catch multiple hallies in the 80 to 120 pound-plus range, and most from manageable depths between 80 and 200 feet.
Over the years I’ve fished halibut just outside the park in Icy Strait, in front of Gustavus, in the mouth of Glacier Bay, and a little west at Elfin Cove and Cross Sound, but the opportunity to catch halibut deep inside the spectacular park in front of calving glacial walls that may hold frozen mastodons is one I’d managed to miss. Until now.
For years I’ve been intrigued by wild stories of halibut hooked inside GBNP and Jim and I are about to find out if the rumors are true. Skipper Jim Kearns holds one of only six permits available to charter boats for fishing inside the tightly regulated GBNP, and he’s got us scheduled to thump bottom for glacial halibut the day after we warm up with silvers and halibut in Icy Strait.
Our kickoff casting to the kelp-bed Dolly Varden frenzy was an unexpected bonus. One of several we were to discover.
The Kearns’ B&B is in a meadow surrounded by walls of spruce and hemlock on a gravel road two miles from the beach, and about that far from Four Corners where the Homeshore Café boldly advertises “The best pizza” in Southeast Alaska. The swag-bellied black bear that walks out of the hemlocks to graze in the yard outside my window is a photogenic surprise. Julene tells me to watch for the cow moose with twin calves, the ones that trim her flower beds.
Before converting their two-story house to a B&B the four-bedrooms, with private baths was the Kearns’ family home and it’s still more home comfort than fish lodge elaborate. Family-style breakfasts, coffee pot without an off-switch, brown-bag lunches, home-made rolls and coffee cakes, fireplace and polite thank you if wet shoes are left at the doorway.
The Dollies and attack salmon are herding great clouds of needlefish into tight clusters then attacking. We hook bright strong fish every cast and when one comes unbuttoned another eats the spoon before it’s retrieved. A massive cloud of needlefish comes past the boat, Jim K swings a boat bucket and in one swoop we have enough salmon bait for the day.
A shotgun report from a distant Nordic tug rental out of Juneau reminds us that halibut are what we came for and Jim K points the 26-foot C-Dory toward Lemesurier Island where in water 54 to 100 feet deep I catch a 40 pound hallie and Jim G nails an 80. Anchored up on the tide change we cast Point Wilson Darts and Butterfly jigs and catch big silvers and pinks on casting and spinning rods. These are strong fish, prone to cartwheeling and streaking and it’s a hoot.
The Dart, rigged with a single Siwash hook is especially lethal on the coho. We release everything except two bleeding pinks that become halibut baits.
The middle of July, surrounded by salmon and halibut whales and wilderness. Not another boat in sight. We slide over to Dot Island where saltwater funnels through a slot and big kings sometimes stack. “Right off this rock,” Jim K tells us, “I caught a 48 pound king and a couple of big halibut one day. Really fun.” We’re ready for fun.
Broken balls of bait ghost beneath us, glowing blobs on the electronics. On anchor, we drop halibut hooks sweetened with fresh pink strips and candlefish into 100 feet of water. Before we pull anchor Jim G and I both release 60 pounders, a couple of chickens and I end the day with a 103 pounder. A boat with an Alaska state trooper and a federal fisheries officer stops to check our paperwork and chat.
At breakfast Jim K looks out the window at a wind-less morning, grins and confirms, “Today we go into the park.”
Spectacular descriptions start at the park boundary a mile offshore where a kelp bed is being ransacked by sea lions and a humpback whale. Yesterday’s mist is gone, replaced by blue sky, the peaks of five mountain ranges (Fairweather, Saint Elias, Chilkat, Takhinsha and Beartracks), miles of flat water and wildlife everywhere. We troll for kings and catch pinks, big pinks, make three passes along the kelp, give up on the kings and head deeper into the park.
When the Declaration of Independence was being signed Glacier Bay was still all glacier and no bay. Where we are fishing in open saltwater was not so long ago a massive river of ice roughly 100 miles long, 20 miles wide and four thousand feet deep.
It strains the imagination to realize that monster ice pack has melted and retreated 65 miles north to where ice fields still flow from high mountains growing a dozen tidewater glaciers that dominate the heads of inlets while they are remnants of what was these tidewater glaciers are still magnificent walls of dinosaur-era ice, calving bergs of sculpted blue art into our halibut water, filling that water with crystal shards that shine like herring scales.
The dynamic topographical history of the area and dramatic landscape is as much a part of this fishing adventure as the fish. Perhaps more so.
Standing at the gunwale, watching dozens of whales feeding in all directions, passing hundreds of back-floating white-faced sea otters, swinging into flat water inlets where people are rare and the beaches are imprinted with wolf and grizzly tracks and little else, in a ring of mountains where the high peaks are permanently encased in snow and the lower summits green with heather and muskeg--Glacier Bay National Park is easily my
most spectacular setting for a halibut trip.
The park is also one of the nation’s most isolated (accessible only by water and walking), remote (65 miles to Juneau) unpopulated (zero excluding park workers), and rarely fished (six charter permits, a few private boats and kayaks from Gustavus, Elfin Cove and Pelican Cove and an occasional rental tug out from Juneau). The 400,000 tourists that come here each summer are mostly tethered to cruise ship railings, rarely seen by fishermen, and they never fish.
Only 30 boats are allowed at a time in GBNP, including cruise ships and fishing charters. There is no other way in and when you get in there is 3.3 million acres and 5,130 miles of water and wilderness to get lost in.
We stop to check for kings around a kelp bed where a humpback whale wearing a tangle of brown fronds is feeding in 10 feet of water with its back glistening in sunshine, gorging on a stream of candlefish 20 yards wide and three times that long.
In the back of Spokane Cove a Nordic Tug is anchored below 3,000-foot mountains so steep they should be called cliffs. We see anglers fishing for halibut. Red crab pot buoys bob near the tug.
We spot our first ice berg in Muir Inlet, a Volkswagen-size ice block stranded on the beach well up from tide line. Further in an eagle whistles and lopes off the shoreline revealing the carcass of a Dall’s porpoise half eaten by Orcas, and in the distance a trail of ice shards leads to the inlet to McBride Glacier.
Jim K eases The Alaska Dream through chunks of churning ice, around bergs being carved and melted by the sun into free-floating statuary until we’re directly off the face of the glacier. Jim G and I are rigging halibut rods when the explosion booms across the bow. More dynamite than firecracker sounding it marks the first of three calvings that we hear, see, and feel--huge sheets of ice simply explode away from the glacial wall then sink bottom first into the blue-green water.
This calf is a hundred feet high, who knows how wide and the wave rocks our boat. “That’s why we don’t get too close,” Jim K grins.
According to the electronics we’re over a shelf in 150 feet of water at the edge of an 800-foot drop. Jim G drops a baited halibut rod. I take photos and wait for a grab that never comes. “Sometimes we do catch halibut right against the glaciers,” Jim K tells us, “but it’s always better a little ways out the inlet.”
So we go back out the inlet, past a cliff wall that’s plastered with nesting black-legged kittiwakes and white downed fledglings and I wonder how these sea birds land on the cliff face without toes or fingers. In a bay with a flat bottom in 180 feet of water we find a drift line for The Alaska Dream off the mouth of a small creek that’s plugged with pink salmon and covered with shrieking confetti of white gulls and terns. The tide is wrong and it takes a couple of drifts in the glacial green and a half-hour of fish time dragging circle hook sandwiches of pink bellies and frozen herring on the bottom but we come up with a 56 pounder and lose a big fish. A very big fish.
On the run back we stop sporadically for more halibut tugs, nose into a kelp line to catch black rockfish from under the noses of a dozen bobbing sea otters that bear a disturbing resemblance to Papa Smurf and throw Point Wilson candlefish Darts into white streaks of tide lines for more pinks and silvers. At no point are we out of sight of a whale, usually multiples.
At the end of the day, the end of the trip with a good load of halibut and salmon in the fish box we hang a left and cruise toward the docks and deluxe boat ramp at park headquarters in Bartlett Cove. A quarter mile from the dock and just yards from The Alaska Dream a massive ebony humpback whale erupts out of the cove in an explosion of saltwater, soars into a full breach pulls off a half twist and crashes down on its side, a towering white and black pectoral flipper waving through the surface. Perfect ending.
It’s like no one has fished here before. And few have.