VALDEZ
Where Silvers Turn To Alaskan Gold
(Originally Published in Fish Alaska magazine)
By Terry W. Sheely
A silver salmon fish town on steroids, is what I’m thinking, steroids and sensory-staggering scenery. Ancient glaciers, massive ice fields, rivers gushing into quarter-mile waterfall plunges, sculpted ice bergs, sea otters, kings, lings, halibut, humungous evil-eyed salmon sharks and spot shrimp prawns so sweet that the melted butter is a waste.
It’s too much. Too much for the time I have available to fish, too much to describe without straining my credibility, without fear of coming across as an Egan Drive booster, just too much. But some times, in some places, too much is the right description. Valdez I’m discovering is one of those places.
I came to Valdez, (pronounce it Val Dēēz ) to catch the end of the exploding Prince William Sound silver season, arriving nine days after 93-year-old great grandma Lenore Groundwater rocketed into world-wide news
by winning, unassisted, the mega-popular Women’s Silver Salmon Derby with an almost 17 pounder. And I left nine days before fishing newbie Jack Yakura of Papua, New Guinea, by way of Pennsylvania and Fairbanks, put 15 grand in his pocket for coming out on top of the six week Valdez Silver Derby.
The rest of the hopefuls should have stayed home: Ladies and Beginners are unbeatable.
When I fished with the irrepressible Rick and Connie Ballow on the Connie B III, a 44-foot Henriques sportfisherman, with a three-story tuna tower they had their fingers crossed that their guest fisher Janette Wakefield’s 16.42 pounder would hold onto third place in the silver derby. And it did.
The railing is wet where my elbows rest on a post overloaded with orange nasturtiums overlooking the lines and gentle bends of docks, spars, radars, antennas, bridges, decks and bows in the small boat harbor at the edge of downtown Valdez. Wet where the two guys in ball caps and rain bibs slice through a mound of succulent red fillets at the public fish cleaning station, wet where the clouds smoke around the emerald peak with the five mountain goats, wet where the fleet, a mix of yachts, charters, kickers and john boats, bob over surging wads of salmon in Valdez Narrows, wet in places that within a month will be white with the first flakes of the 325.6 inches of snow that transform this summer fish town into an adrenalin-popping winter recreation Mecca..
Past the boats and across the bay, spears of sunlight stream through a swirl of gauzy clouds hung up on jaggedpoints in the Chugach Mountains. The spears light up the southern terminus of the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline, shine on bank fishermen hurling Pixee spoons, Vibrax spinners and stringy clumps of red salmon eggs dangling below foam bobbers into the migration path along Allison Point, just out from the all-important Solomon Gulch Hatchery.
The hatchery is what turns this silver town golden. The Valdez Fisheries Development Association facility pumps a monstrous two million silver smolts a year into the town’s backyard, sending them to sea and growing a return of 100,000 adult coho for the derbies, smokehouses and freezers of Valdez. The hatchery also produces enough smolts for a return of 10 million grown up pinks, and a starter run of 10,000 kings in the hope of eveloping a major king salmon fishery that will fill up the early summer weeks with chinook while the town waits for its iconic silvers to arrive.
At the hatchery terns and gulls scream and carpet the water in the outfall, hundreds of white and gray scavengers gorged on broadcast eggs and pink salmon carcasses. Bear warning signs are posted at the nearby public bank fishing areas on Allison Point. Eagles are in the trees. Everything turns out for the salmon run.
But it doesn’t stop with the silvers. Valdez, I discover has more to offer: halibut in theGulf of Alaska, ling cod to the north, yellow eyes, rockfish, the starter run of Solomon Gulch chinook, pinks, chums, and evil-eyed salmon sharks 200 to 600 pounders. Add the shrimp and shellfish, wildlife, and calendar scenery and you stay awed.
To get here, to fish first with Connie and Rick and then two days with Dave Pope under his pirate flag on Sharktooth Charters, I flew in from Anchorage, catching an ERA Dash 8-800 turbo prop for a nose-to-the-portal low level hop across the ice fields and streaming glaciers of the Chugach Mountains. Spectacular ice sculptures that defy description.
When the small plane banks low around Valdez I make out the wide gray ribbon of Richardson Highway 4 climbing along the Lowe River toward Thompson Pass. This is the highway that makes Valdez, a bona fide fish-town rarity in Alaska. It gives fishermen drawn by the wealth of silvers homing in on Prince William Sound a land route connection between Valdezand the rest of North America. Others come by Alaska/ERA Aviation or on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry. It’s been my experience that few top Alaskan saltwater fish towns have highway access and Valdez makes the most of it.
Half-a-dozen RV parks and campgrounds cater to rubber-tire anglers, nine hotels, and 30 B&Bs, ethnic restaurants, fish shipping stations, commercial smokehouses and freezers—a bunch of services and accommodations for a town of 4,000.
The crowd of parked RVs, trailered boats, motor homes, tents, tarps and campers in Eagle’s Rest RV park arrived down the Richardson looking for silver salmon. On the ground, I spot license plates from Fairbanks, Eagle, Anchorage, British Columbia, Yukon, Alberta,Montana, Washington, Oregon and Midwestern states.
At the airport a dozen outbound anglers are packing out stacks of fish boxes. I pick up my rental car at the Valdez U Drive counter, check out the public boat ramp, buy a fishing license at the Prospector and check into the Totem Inn.
Before rendezvousing with Connie and husband Rick Ballow on the Connie B III I take the edge off the morning with a stack of cakes, thick ham, eggs and a pot of black coffee in the adjacent Totem restaurant—a kitschy down-home eatery with flannel shirts, boat boots, family style menu; fishing hours, walrus tusk, souvenirs, CNN and life-size mounts of a 205 pound silvertip timber wolf, and Rick Ballow’s 41-6/8 inch un-broomed, full curl Dall.
No hurry, says Connie, we’ll catch our silvers.
I believe her.
Most of the silvers in Prince William Sound are funneling right to us out of the Gulf of Alaska, past Whittier, Cordova, the skid marks of the 497-foot Exxon Valdez on Bligh Reef and into the squeeze of Valdez Narrows in the far toe of PWS.
A dozen sportfishing businesses operate out of Valdez, according to Dave Petersen at the visitor and convention bureau, some providing day trip charters, others offering boat rentals, and some booking overnight adventures.
Fog hangs in smoky tendrils around the mountains and pulls a smothering blanket across the water when Rick eases the1400 horses in the twin CAT engines to life in the harbor. Both Rick and Connie are Coast Guard licensed captains and their 44 foot sportfisherman is still wearing the 28-foot high tuna tower it wore when it was shuttled from the East Coast to Valdez.
The Connie B III is designed and outfitted primarily for multi-day adventures, exploring Prince William Sound, pounding halibut, lings, yelloweyes and kings on the reefs in the Gulf of Alaska, locking into truck-tough salmon sharks at Port Gravina, hauling in shrimp pots, nosing up to glaciers, chipping drink ice from floating ice bergs.
They’re set up for three day trips, Connie says, but able to dial in custom trips like today. With a fuel tank large enough to swallow my entire line of bank credit, the Connie B III has the range and definitely the comforts. A 12 x 14 foot lounge disappears down a three-step passageway into two staterooms, a full shower and head. In the galley/cabin are a full-size, range, oven, microwave, refrigerator, wine bar, television/DVD player, radio, couch--all of the usual necessities.
On the business end are four Penn Fathomaster downriggers—two electric, two manual. Rick climbs the ladder to run the boat from the flying bridge and Connie grabs the bait knife. From a herring she slices two precision cut fillet strips, skewers one strip onto a pair of 6/0 Gamakatzu mooching hooks, the other on 4/0s, attaches the leaders to dodgers and we’re fishing. “My secret hookup,” she confides.
The Valdez silver fishery starts in July out in PWS, Connie says, then works progressively closer to Valdez. By August it’s in the Valdez Narrows, and around Labor Day town fishermen are catching silvers in the boat basin, off the city dock, from piers and breakwaters in downtown. “It’s a circus,” is how she describes it, “a silver salmon circus.”
Fog is burning off; Rick is hunting for pods of silvers with the fish finder, spotting small schools at 30 to 50 feet, and trolling through an eclectic fleet of inflatable river boats, yachts, charters, and skiffs. We change locations coming up to one of the town’s close-in hot-spots near the 1,000 foot waterfall crashing down the face of Mount Thomas, gushing from the base of Anderson Glacier, an icy exclamation point on the massive Columbia Glacier.
Connie is the consummate fisherman on board, and is working hard to dial in the bite. “I love to fish,” she says. She resets the gear, runs the baits out 20 feet behind the downrigger balls, shouts something to Rick, and the boat turns toward where her instincts directed. We’re on a thin current line, with fish marking on the finder, when both rods go off. Two silvers smack the deck, the skunk is off the boat and we’re dancin’ the salmon slam. But there is frustration in the boat, short-strikers, light hookups, lost fish.
The real bite hits when the outgoing slack turns and the incoming starts. Connie is irrepressible and feeling lucky. ‘Sometimes it’s tough to get them to bite on the outgoing,” she says, and Rick adds, “Bite is always better on an incoming.” They grin like they’re holding back a surprise.
Like punctuation marks the rods buck and dive. Hookups come faster when we trail the bottom hook instead of embedding it in the fillet, and even faster when we switch over to flashy tight-spinning plug cut herring. For a change we drape a rainbow-colored plastic squid/hoochie over the herring strip and it draws strikes as well. There must be a carpet of silvers under us.
The morning’s frustration disappears into afternoon action. It’s not fast, but it’s productive and occasionally kicked into the crazy dance when triples hook up. The trick is staying on the fish when we find them. There’s a
ribbon of silvers under the current line and as long as Rick can hold the boat in position we nail fish. Lose it and the action dies until we circle back and pick it up again.
We work the incoming for our three limits of six coho each. The 18th silver of the day nails my plug cut, careens under the boat, out the other side and into the wake. Rick sweeps it into the net, a glistening chromer spotted with sea lice. The fish box is fat with prime Prince William Sound silvers.We add a side-order of huge spot shrimp prawns from a string of five pots that Rick had set the day before. Rain is starting to spit, sea otters are bobbing on their backs in all directions, the four mountain goats I’ve been watching walk into a cloud and it’s time to head for the dock and to find a steak I can bury in prawns.
At 6:45 a.m., full of Totem Inn eggs and hashbrowns I’m standing on Dock E5 at the Dawn Treader a 34-foot Tibercraft, shaking hands with skipper Dave Pope of Sharktooth Charters. Gulls are picking yesterday’s leavings out of the public fish cleaning station, boat motors rumble, a charter leaves the marina, then another. Fog is hanging in there.
We’re joined by Joe Cermele, fishing editor, Field and Stream magazine and his fishing buddy Eric Kerber who runs a fishing charter out of New Jersey, wherever that is.
Just when I think I’ve seen every creative trolling variation along comes Dave Pope. We slide through the fog, run on the radar and pull up well past where I caught salmon yesterday. “When the fish aren’t thick inside it sometimes pays to come out to find them,” Dave explains.
And find them we did.
A stack of fish is wadded up on the eddy side of a small rock island a quarter mile offshore. The silvers are aggressively taking baitfish that are getting caught in the current and swirled past the rocks. If we miss the mark by 100 feet we go fishless. Hit it and all rods go off.
This is where it starts normal and gets wild in a hurry..We’re set up with 8½ foot Loomis trolling rods, pinned into downriggers. The terminal rigs are Dave Pope originals. A plug cut herring is injected with liquid garlic scent and hooked onto two-5/0 Gamakatzu hooks tied in tandem. A 2½ inch soft plastic Berkley Gulp minnow is pinned to the top hook alongside the herring. A multi-colored plastic squid is threaded on the leader and pulled down partially over the herring and the whole shooting match is connected to a small, four-inch dodger then snapped into the downrigger.
When a rod bucks Dave flies to the rod and strips line like a whirling dervish, throwing yards and yards of slack into the water behind the still-trolling boat. Ten yards, 20, 30, 40. The slack line runs freely through a specially
rigged outrigger release like those used in kite fishing. When enough line is spilled, he waits for the line to tighten and sets the hook, popping the line off the downrigger and the hook into the silver. It’s an unorthodox technique, bordering on over-the-top crazy but it works.
“Strip, strip, strip, strip!!” Dave hollers, at the strike. No, no, no, he says. Don’t take the rod out of the holder. Leave it sit and just strip line off the reel as fast as you can!” None of us get it right the first few times, but finally the skipper is smiling and fish are coming in the boat.
The theory, Dave tells me, is to have the struck herring free fall like a mooched bait, the other baits are trolled away while the salmon decides if the wounded bait is fit to eat. If the bait isn’t stripped back on slack line it trolls away from the attacking fish, the skipper reasons. By stripping up to 100 feet, sometimes more, of line off the reel the bait stays where it’s first struck, like a struggling natural, while the other rods continue to troll for fish. The plastic minnow? That’s for added scent, he says. “You can’t feed too much line. The worst thing that can happen is it eats the bait all the way down before you set the hook, and that’s not so bad.”
A squall moves in, big drops splatter the surface like gravel thrown from a helicopter but Dave keeps stripping slack and the bite keeps popping. At times it’s a cluster duck on the back deck, rods in the air, line zinging, reels singing, net flying.Sometimes the silvers come in one at time, sometimes three at once. Occasionally we land all, but most of the time we’re lucky to land two and sometimes just one. The males are showing hooked kypes and some carry sea lice. Most are dime bright, but some show a little green and gold along the flanks.
We have our limits but manage to lose even more while horsing hot silvers into range of Joe’s underwater video for F & S.
At the end, we slip over to a halibut hole that Skipper Dave has held in reserve, and drop butterfly jigs sweetened with herring heads. We catch quillbacks and rockfish but no hallies.
The fog is gone, the mountains are out. The snow encrusted flanks of Mount Shasta loom in the distance and we can see shine on Anderson Glacier. We’ve got our fish, and Dave swings the Dawn Treader past the face of Shoup Glacier, where small chunks of ancient blue ice bob in the Sound. We’re inside Valdez Narrows near a state marine park that can be reached by trail from Valdez.
Back at the boat harbor there’s a crowd of anglers waiting for elbow room at the public fish cleaning station.
Clouds are unwrapping from the Chugachs like wet ribbons of smoke, rising, shifting around the peaks, sliding across last winter’s leftover snow, and settling into the pockets and green alleys.
The next two nights I’m staying in a two-room cabin with a crackling electric fireplace and a hot shower in row of small cabins at Eagle’s Rest RV Park. The buzz outside is nothing but silver salmon talk. Boats are pulling in and out. The family next to me has brought a freezer bungeed into the bed of a pickup truck with an extension cord running into the cabin. No mystery about their intent.
Tomorrow I’m back on the Dawn Treader, watching Skipper Dave explain his slack-line tactic to half-a-dozen anglers from Fairbanks, Minnesota, and North Plain, Oregon. They are wide-eyed, excited and hungry for salmon.
By our second pass at exactly 1½ mph through the smattering of white caps on Galena Bay the fish box is getting heavy with silvers and everybody is smiling. There’s a big wad of silvers on a rock shelf that show up like yellow blobs on Dave’s fish finder and every time we cross the shelf, rods go off.
Jon Kokoschke came from Minnesota to dance along the transom rail with 12 pounds of wild-eyed silver salmon leaping in the wake.
He’s grinning!
Two dozen gorgeous silvers are chilling in the fish box.
Was there ever any doubt—Valdez is where silver turns to gold?
By Terry W. Sheely
A silver salmon fish town on steroids, is what I’m thinking, steroids and sensory-staggering scenery. Ancient glaciers, massive ice fields, rivers gushing into quarter-mile waterfall plunges, sculpted ice bergs, sea otters, kings, lings, halibut, humungous evil-eyed salmon sharks and spot shrimp prawns so sweet that the melted butter is a waste.
It’s too much. Too much for the time I have available to fish, too much to describe without straining my credibility, without fear of coming across as an Egan Drive booster, just too much. But some times, in some places, too much is the right description. Valdez I’m discovering is one of those places.
I came to Valdez, (pronounce it Val Dēēz ) to catch the end of the exploding Prince William Sound silver season, arriving nine days after 93-year-old great grandma Lenore Groundwater rocketed into world-wide news
by winning, unassisted, the mega-popular Women’s Silver Salmon Derby with an almost 17 pounder. And I left nine days before fishing newbie Jack Yakura of Papua, New Guinea, by way of Pennsylvania and Fairbanks, put 15 grand in his pocket for coming out on top of the six week Valdez Silver Derby.
The rest of the hopefuls should have stayed home: Ladies and Beginners are unbeatable.
When I fished with the irrepressible Rick and Connie Ballow on the Connie B III, a 44-foot Henriques sportfisherman, with a three-story tuna tower they had their fingers crossed that their guest fisher Janette Wakefield’s 16.42 pounder would hold onto third place in the silver derby. And it did.
The railing is wet where my elbows rest on a post overloaded with orange nasturtiums overlooking the lines and gentle bends of docks, spars, radars, antennas, bridges, decks and bows in the small boat harbor at the edge of downtown Valdez. Wet where the two guys in ball caps and rain bibs slice through a mound of succulent red fillets at the public fish cleaning station, wet where the clouds smoke around the emerald peak with the five mountain goats, wet where the fleet, a mix of yachts, charters, kickers and john boats, bob over surging wads of salmon in Valdez Narrows, wet in places that within a month will be white with the first flakes of the 325.6 inches of snow that transform this summer fish town into an adrenalin-popping winter recreation Mecca..
Past the boats and across the bay, spears of sunlight stream through a swirl of gauzy clouds hung up on jaggedpoints in the Chugach Mountains. The spears light up the southern terminus of the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline, shine on bank fishermen hurling Pixee spoons, Vibrax spinners and stringy clumps of red salmon eggs dangling below foam bobbers into the migration path along Allison Point, just out from the all-important Solomon Gulch Hatchery.
The hatchery is what turns this silver town golden. The Valdez Fisheries Development Association facility pumps a monstrous two million silver smolts a year into the town’s backyard, sending them to sea and growing a return of 100,000 adult coho for the derbies, smokehouses and freezers of Valdez. The hatchery also produces enough smolts for a return of 10 million grown up pinks, and a starter run of 10,000 kings in the hope of eveloping a major king salmon fishery that will fill up the early summer weeks with chinook while the town waits for its iconic silvers to arrive.
At the hatchery terns and gulls scream and carpet the water in the outfall, hundreds of white and gray scavengers gorged on broadcast eggs and pink salmon carcasses. Bear warning signs are posted at the nearby public bank fishing areas on Allison Point. Eagles are in the trees. Everything turns out for the salmon run.
But it doesn’t stop with the silvers. Valdez, I discover has more to offer: halibut in theGulf of Alaska, ling cod to the north, yellow eyes, rockfish, the starter run of Solomon Gulch chinook, pinks, chums, and evil-eyed salmon sharks 200 to 600 pounders. Add the shrimp and shellfish, wildlife, and calendar scenery and you stay awed.
To get here, to fish first with Connie and Rick and then two days with Dave Pope under his pirate flag on Sharktooth Charters, I flew in from Anchorage, catching an ERA Dash 8-800 turbo prop for a nose-to-the-portal low level hop across the ice fields and streaming glaciers of the Chugach Mountains. Spectacular ice sculptures that defy description.
When the small plane banks low around Valdez I make out the wide gray ribbon of Richardson Highway 4 climbing along the Lowe River toward Thompson Pass. This is the highway that makes Valdez, a bona fide fish-town rarity in Alaska. It gives fishermen drawn by the wealth of silvers homing in on Prince William Sound a land route connection between Valdezand the rest of North America. Others come by Alaska/ERA Aviation or on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry. It’s been my experience that few top Alaskan saltwater fish towns have highway access and Valdez makes the most of it.
Half-a-dozen RV parks and campgrounds cater to rubber-tire anglers, nine hotels, and 30 B&Bs, ethnic restaurants, fish shipping stations, commercial smokehouses and freezers—a bunch of services and accommodations for a town of 4,000.
The crowd of parked RVs, trailered boats, motor homes, tents, tarps and campers in Eagle’s Rest RV park arrived down the Richardson looking for silver salmon. On the ground, I spot license plates from Fairbanks, Eagle, Anchorage, British Columbia, Yukon, Alberta,Montana, Washington, Oregon and Midwestern states.
At the airport a dozen outbound anglers are packing out stacks of fish boxes. I pick up my rental car at the Valdez U Drive counter, check out the public boat ramp, buy a fishing license at the Prospector and check into the Totem Inn.
Before rendezvousing with Connie and husband Rick Ballow on the Connie B III I take the edge off the morning with a stack of cakes, thick ham, eggs and a pot of black coffee in the adjacent Totem restaurant—a kitschy down-home eatery with flannel shirts, boat boots, family style menu; fishing hours, walrus tusk, souvenirs, CNN and life-size mounts of a 205 pound silvertip timber wolf, and Rick Ballow’s 41-6/8 inch un-broomed, full curl Dall.
No hurry, says Connie, we’ll catch our silvers.
I believe her.
Most of the silvers in Prince William Sound are funneling right to us out of the Gulf of Alaska, past Whittier, Cordova, the skid marks of the 497-foot Exxon Valdez on Bligh Reef and into the squeeze of Valdez Narrows in the far toe of PWS.
A dozen sportfishing businesses operate out of Valdez, according to Dave Petersen at the visitor and convention bureau, some providing day trip charters, others offering boat rentals, and some booking overnight adventures.
Fog hangs in smoky tendrils around the mountains and pulls a smothering blanket across the water when Rick eases the1400 horses in the twin CAT engines to life in the harbor. Both Rick and Connie are Coast Guard licensed captains and their 44 foot sportfisherman is still wearing the 28-foot high tuna tower it wore when it was shuttled from the East Coast to Valdez.
The Connie B III is designed and outfitted primarily for multi-day adventures, exploring Prince William Sound, pounding halibut, lings, yelloweyes and kings on the reefs in the Gulf of Alaska, locking into truck-tough salmon sharks at Port Gravina, hauling in shrimp pots, nosing up to glaciers, chipping drink ice from floating ice bergs.
They’re set up for three day trips, Connie says, but able to dial in custom trips like today. With a fuel tank large enough to swallow my entire line of bank credit, the Connie B III has the range and definitely the comforts. A 12 x 14 foot lounge disappears down a three-step passageway into two staterooms, a full shower and head. In the galley/cabin are a full-size, range, oven, microwave, refrigerator, wine bar, television/DVD player, radio, couch--all of the usual necessities.
On the business end are four Penn Fathomaster downriggers—two electric, two manual. Rick climbs the ladder to run the boat from the flying bridge and Connie grabs the bait knife. From a herring she slices two precision cut fillet strips, skewers one strip onto a pair of 6/0 Gamakatzu mooching hooks, the other on 4/0s, attaches the leaders to dodgers and we’re fishing. “My secret hookup,” she confides.
The Valdez silver fishery starts in July out in PWS, Connie says, then works progressively closer to Valdez. By August it’s in the Valdez Narrows, and around Labor Day town fishermen are catching silvers in the boat basin, off the city dock, from piers and breakwaters in downtown. “It’s a circus,” is how she describes it, “a silver salmon circus.”
Fog is burning off; Rick is hunting for pods of silvers with the fish finder, spotting small schools at 30 to 50 feet, and trolling through an eclectic fleet of inflatable river boats, yachts, charters, and skiffs. We change locations coming up to one of the town’s close-in hot-spots near the 1,000 foot waterfall crashing down the face of Mount Thomas, gushing from the base of Anderson Glacier, an icy exclamation point on the massive Columbia Glacier.
Connie is the consummate fisherman on board, and is working hard to dial in the bite. “I love to fish,” she says. She resets the gear, runs the baits out 20 feet behind the downrigger balls, shouts something to Rick, and the boat turns toward where her instincts directed. We’re on a thin current line, with fish marking on the finder, when both rods go off. Two silvers smack the deck, the skunk is off the boat and we’re dancin’ the salmon slam. But there is frustration in the boat, short-strikers, light hookups, lost fish.
The real bite hits when the outgoing slack turns and the incoming starts. Connie is irrepressible and feeling lucky. ‘Sometimes it’s tough to get them to bite on the outgoing,” she says, and Rick adds, “Bite is always better on an incoming.” They grin like they’re holding back a surprise.
Like punctuation marks the rods buck and dive. Hookups come faster when we trail the bottom hook instead of embedding it in the fillet, and even faster when we switch over to flashy tight-spinning plug cut herring. For a change we drape a rainbow-colored plastic squid/hoochie over the herring strip and it draws strikes as well. There must be a carpet of silvers under us.
The morning’s frustration disappears into afternoon action. It’s not fast, but it’s productive and occasionally kicked into the crazy dance when triples hook up. The trick is staying on the fish when we find them. There’s a
ribbon of silvers under the current line and as long as Rick can hold the boat in position we nail fish. Lose it and the action dies until we circle back and pick it up again.
We work the incoming for our three limits of six coho each. The 18th silver of the day nails my plug cut, careens under the boat, out the other side and into the wake. Rick sweeps it into the net, a glistening chromer spotted with sea lice. The fish box is fat with prime Prince William Sound silvers.We add a side-order of huge spot shrimp prawns from a string of five pots that Rick had set the day before. Rain is starting to spit, sea otters are bobbing on their backs in all directions, the four mountain goats I’ve been watching walk into a cloud and it’s time to head for the dock and to find a steak I can bury in prawns.
At 6:45 a.m., full of Totem Inn eggs and hashbrowns I’m standing on Dock E5 at the Dawn Treader a 34-foot Tibercraft, shaking hands with skipper Dave Pope of Sharktooth Charters. Gulls are picking yesterday’s leavings out of the public fish cleaning station, boat motors rumble, a charter leaves the marina, then another. Fog is hanging in there.
We’re joined by Joe Cermele, fishing editor, Field and Stream magazine and his fishing buddy Eric Kerber who runs a fishing charter out of New Jersey, wherever that is.
Just when I think I’ve seen every creative trolling variation along comes Dave Pope. We slide through the fog, run on the radar and pull up well past where I caught salmon yesterday. “When the fish aren’t thick inside it sometimes pays to come out to find them,” Dave explains.
And find them we did.
A stack of fish is wadded up on the eddy side of a small rock island a quarter mile offshore. The silvers are aggressively taking baitfish that are getting caught in the current and swirled past the rocks. If we miss the mark by 100 feet we go fishless. Hit it and all rods go off.
This is where it starts normal and gets wild in a hurry..We’re set up with 8½ foot Loomis trolling rods, pinned into downriggers. The terminal rigs are Dave Pope originals. A plug cut herring is injected with liquid garlic scent and hooked onto two-5/0 Gamakatzu hooks tied in tandem. A 2½ inch soft plastic Berkley Gulp minnow is pinned to the top hook alongside the herring. A multi-colored plastic squid is threaded on the leader and pulled down partially over the herring and the whole shooting match is connected to a small, four-inch dodger then snapped into the downrigger.
When a rod bucks Dave flies to the rod and strips line like a whirling dervish, throwing yards and yards of slack into the water behind the still-trolling boat. Ten yards, 20, 30, 40. The slack line runs freely through a specially
rigged outrigger release like those used in kite fishing. When enough line is spilled, he waits for the line to tighten and sets the hook, popping the line off the downrigger and the hook into the silver. It’s an unorthodox technique, bordering on over-the-top crazy but it works.
“Strip, strip, strip, strip!!” Dave hollers, at the strike. No, no, no, he says. Don’t take the rod out of the holder. Leave it sit and just strip line off the reel as fast as you can!” None of us get it right the first few times, but finally the skipper is smiling and fish are coming in the boat.
The theory, Dave tells me, is to have the struck herring free fall like a mooched bait, the other baits are trolled away while the salmon decides if the wounded bait is fit to eat. If the bait isn’t stripped back on slack line it trolls away from the attacking fish, the skipper reasons. By stripping up to 100 feet, sometimes more, of line off the reel the bait stays where it’s first struck, like a struggling natural, while the other rods continue to troll for fish. The plastic minnow? That’s for added scent, he says. “You can’t feed too much line. The worst thing that can happen is it eats the bait all the way down before you set the hook, and that’s not so bad.”
A squall moves in, big drops splatter the surface like gravel thrown from a helicopter but Dave keeps stripping slack and the bite keeps popping. At times it’s a cluster duck on the back deck, rods in the air, line zinging, reels singing, net flying.Sometimes the silvers come in one at time, sometimes three at once. Occasionally we land all, but most of the time we’re lucky to land two and sometimes just one. The males are showing hooked kypes and some carry sea lice. Most are dime bright, but some show a little green and gold along the flanks.
We have our limits but manage to lose even more while horsing hot silvers into range of Joe’s underwater video for F & S.
At the end, we slip over to a halibut hole that Skipper Dave has held in reserve, and drop butterfly jigs sweetened with herring heads. We catch quillbacks and rockfish but no hallies.
The fog is gone, the mountains are out. The snow encrusted flanks of Mount Shasta loom in the distance and we can see shine on Anderson Glacier. We’ve got our fish, and Dave swings the Dawn Treader past the face of Shoup Glacier, where small chunks of ancient blue ice bob in the Sound. We’re inside Valdez Narrows near a state marine park that can be reached by trail from Valdez.
Back at the boat harbor there’s a crowd of anglers waiting for elbow room at the public fish cleaning station.
Clouds are unwrapping from the Chugachs like wet ribbons of smoke, rising, shifting around the peaks, sliding across last winter’s leftover snow, and settling into the pockets and green alleys.
The next two nights I’m staying in a two-room cabin with a crackling electric fireplace and a hot shower in row of small cabins at Eagle’s Rest RV Park. The buzz outside is nothing but silver salmon talk. Boats are pulling in and out. The family next to me has brought a freezer bungeed into the bed of a pickup truck with an extension cord running into the cabin. No mystery about their intent.
Tomorrow I’m back on the Dawn Treader, watching Skipper Dave explain his slack-line tactic to half-a-dozen anglers from Fairbanks, Minnesota, and North Plain, Oregon. They are wide-eyed, excited and hungry for salmon.
By our second pass at exactly 1½ mph through the smattering of white caps on Galena Bay the fish box is getting heavy with silvers and everybody is smiling. There’s a big wad of silvers on a rock shelf that show up like yellow blobs on Dave’s fish finder and every time we cross the shelf, rods go off.
Jon Kokoschke came from Minnesota to dance along the transom rail with 12 pounds of wild-eyed silver salmon leaping in the wake.
He’s grinning!
Two dozen gorgeous silvers are chilling in the fish box.
Was there ever any doubt—Valdez is where silver turns to gold?
Valdez Beyond Silvers
Silver salmon dominate Valdez, from its $80,000 string of derbies, to the awesome return of fish generated at Solomon Gulch, but silvers aren’t the only attractions going here.
Fishermen target halibut in the Gulf of Alaska from April into the first storms of September; pinks in June and July; chums from May to September; kings February to June; rockfish year round, lings July to December; and river fish for cutthroat, Dolly Varden, grayling and rainbows most of the year. It’s also a central port for
tackling 200 to 800 pound salmon sharks in late summer when the big fish show up to feast on pink salmon in Prince William Sound, just inside the Gulf of Alaska.
The fastest growing attraction is the Silver Salmon Sisterhood women’s fishing derby. Almost a thousand women
from far flung reaches of North America turn out for the annual women’s only event.
The end of derby season is capped with the Spawn ‘til Dawn Awards Party Labor Day weekend.
Explorers can check out the Alyeska Pipeline Interpretive Viewpoint at the city dock, inspect artifacts at the Whitney, Valdez and Remember Old Town Valdez museums, hike into the 20 waterfalls up Keystone Canyon, drive up to Thompson Pass to hunt for ptarmigan or walk on Worthington Glacier. There’s trails to hike into the Chugach Mountains, or follow the Shoup Bay Trail west around the base of Mount Shasta to Shoup Bay State
Marine Park and Shoup Glacier or drive six miles up a gravel road into Mineral Creek Canyon to an abandoned
goldstamp mill.
Mountain bikers grind up the historicto Valdez Glacier. Glaciers are a big part of the city’s calendar scenery. Columbia Glacier is the second largest tidewater glacier in America. Glacier and wildlife cruise tours abound. A wildlife cruise boat reaches Columbia Glacier daily. Meares Glacier routinely calves huge chunks of mastodon-era ice into Unakwik Inlet in front of cruise boat tourists from Valdez.
Sea kayak tours and rentals work from the boat harbor and along the waterfront, guided glacier climbing and
hiking tours are available, along with wildlife excursions to see and photograph whales, bears, sea otters, orcas, sea lions, summit feeding mountain goats and occasionally a bear or moose along the Lowe River flats.
Winter recreation kicks in when the first snow falls and rarely ends before mid-April. Heli-skiing and snowmobiling are huge. In late March there’s a Snowkite Festival at Thompson Pass, an Ice Climbing Festival
on frozen waterfalls, and the Tailgate Alaska World Freeride Festival, and King of the Hill snowboarding
championship.
For a small town, Valdez is big on outdoor recreation.
More information is available from Valdez Convention & Visitor Bureau
www.valdezalaska.org
My Contacts:
Valdez Convention & Visitor Bureau
907-835-2984
Totem Inn Hotel & Suites:
www.toteminn.com
1-888-808-4431
Eagle’s Rest RV Park and Cabins:
www.eaglesrestrv.com
1-800-553-7275
Prince William Sound Sportfishing & Adventures:
www.toteminn.com
Rick and Connie Ballow
907-835-5664
Sharktooth Charters:
www.sharktoothcharters.com
Dave Pope
907-351-8853
The Prospector, licenses, tackle and outdoor gear
www.prospectoroutfitters.com
907-835-3858
Valdez U Drive rental vehicles:
http://valdezudrive.com/
907-835-4402
ERA Aviation
www.flyera.com/contact
1-800-866-8394
Alaska Marine Highway
www.FerryAlaska.com
1-800-642-0066
Valdez Convention & Visitor Bureau
907-835-2984
Totem Inn Hotel & Suites:
www.toteminn.com
1-888-808-4431
Eagle’s Rest RV Park and Cabins:
www.eaglesrestrv.com
1-800-553-7275
Prince William Sound Sportfishing & Adventures:
www.toteminn.com
Rick and Connie Ballow
907-835-5664
Sharktooth Charters:
www.sharktoothcharters.com
Dave Pope
907-351-8853
The Prospector, licenses, tackle and outdoor gear
www.prospectoroutfitters.com
907-835-3858
Valdez U Drive rental vehicles:
http://valdezudrive.com/
907-835-4402
ERA Aviation
www.flyera.com/contact
1-800-866-8394
Alaska Marine Highway
www.FerryAlaska.com
1-800-642-0066