Chasing Steelhead in Style
Story and photo by Troy Letherman
To start there was venison stew with morel mushrooms, pheasant cassoulet, butternut squash, cream of broccoli soup with cheddar cheese and crab. Second course: spring mixed greens with pistachio balsamic vinaigrette one night, Roma tomatoes with marinated mozzarella and Kalamata olives the next. By the time entrees were served, the Alaskan Amber from the hors d’ouevres reception had inevitably been swapped for a glass of red wine from Chateau Franc-Pérat. On successive nights, we were treated to herb-crusted rack of New Zealand lamb, seared salmon with lemon cream, and oyster-stuffed rockfish fillets. To finish, Grand Marnier crème brulee or Bananas Foster on vanilla ice cream.
It didn’t feel like any steelhead camp I’d ever known. [emember_protected custom_msg=’This content is available for subscribers only.’]
Years devoted to the pursuit of the fickle-minded, always-elusive sea-run rainbows of the Last Frontier had departed the notion that red beans and rice was to be viewed as a delicacy. A stop at a roadside saloon, where one might gain some shelter from the elements as well as a good burger and a cold beer, was quite often as swanky as it got.
This, then, was a surprise, and entirely welcome.
Steelheaders are a naturally pessimistic bunch, but I must admit, even before we sat down to our initial dinner, an air of fortuity had somehow seeped into the fabric of the trip. Nearly half a day after Marcus Weiner and I had set off from the early-morning darkness of Anchorage, we stretched in the perpetual drizzle of the Ketchikan docks, trying to shed the bewilderment particular to a full taste of the Alaska Airlines milk run through Southeast, which includes enough improbable landings on even more improbable runways to cloak the issue of arrival in sufficient doubt. Having made it this far leant momentum to a notion I’d been actively suppressing for better than month—that a bright, spring-returning steelhead, or even two, was virtually guaranteed. Our moods found room to improve during the subsequent floatplane hop, as we discovered the fog and low-lying gray of Ketchikan absent from the neighboring island that was our ultimate destination. Then, under a mostly clear sky, with the fading but still flaxen light of an April evening dampening the tea-colored look of Staney Creek, Marcus came tight against the first fish of the trip.
A fish in the first five casts was not what we were expecting, even in our inflated, post-winter cheer, but then much in this trip was taking on the shape of surprise. For instance, I would soon know 2000 had been a very good year for Bordeaux.
Marcus fought his fish with caution, like any man with months of snow and ice in his past and a modicum of sense in his possession would. Soon, though, he and guide Kenji King had the fish in the shallows and then in hand. As the steelhead emerged from the inky water, exposing sleek sides the color of liquid mercury, I briefly lost hold of my own optimism. Almost immediately afterward, as Marcus and Kenji shared smiles and a handshake and I rued my karmic mistake, it began to rain. After dinner that first night, while we enjoyed a cigar on the lodge’s deck, it continued to rain. From then on, it felt exactly like a steelhead trip.
Prince of Wales Island, the third largest in the U.S., sits at the wild steelhead nexus of North America’s last best fisheries. Just to the southeast lie the great wilderness rivers of British Columbia, while only a few miles west begins the progression of steelhead waters that illuminate Alaska’s southeast panhandle. There are 331 streams in southeast Alaska that are presently known to support returning steelhead, and over 70 of them are on Prince of Wales Island. Such a concentration of viable waters, each with its own allure, simply cannot be found anywhere else. For steelhead anglers on Prince of Wales Island, there is the comfort of fishing known quantities like the Thorne, the Karta, Staney Creek. There are also a countless number of rain-forest creeks and coastal streams to be explored, where solitude and the setting are meant to compensate for smaller, less predictable returns. Not incidentally, there are twenty-pound fish to be found on the island, just as there are twenty-fish days to be had.
Travel to Prince of Wales Island is not a recent phenomenon, nor is coming specifically for the fish. The first Europeans to explore the island sailed under the Spanish flag and the command of Don Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra. Three years later came Captain Cook, ubiquitous among the early annals of coastal Alaska. In 1780, Captain George Vancouver, a chart-maker, visited the island with his detailed pen, leaving behind a lasting sobriquet (he named the island for George, Prince of Wales, who would be crowned King George IV in 1821). The Russians arrived soon after, followed by a number of logging and mining concerns. It was the area’s fish, however, that provided reason enough for permanent settlement. A trading post and salmon saltery were established in Klawock in 1868 and then one of the state’s first salmon canneries a decade later.
Klawock had been the location of an important summer fish camp for the island’s Tlingit Indians, who along with the Haida, had occupied the island long before any Europeans stumbled ashore to claim discovery. Another site of seasonal importance for the local Natives was the area around the present-day community of Craig. Then, Tlingits and Haidas used the area as a place to gather herring roe in the spring and fresh salmon later in the year. Appropriately, they called it Fish Egg Island. Now, Craig is the largest community on Prince of Wales and is connected to the rest of the island by a causeway. It’s also the jumping off point for most of the anglers who visit today.
We were nearly alone at the lodge, and the bulk of the staff that had already arrived was busy preparing for the frenzied summer activity of a fishing lodge in southeast Alaska. Boats and other equipment had to be prepped, menus needed to be set, rooms arranged; the 940-foot boardwalk leading from the docks to the lodge’s front stepsrequired touching up. Art Moody, beginning his third year as lodge manager, was busy with the construction of some creature comforts for a family of ducks expected to arrive almost any day. Not nearly as industrious, Marcus and I finished a leisurely breakfast, labored through a last cup of coffee while staring at the rain that fell in soft, silent sheets across the bay, and then followed our guide to the fishing.
Alaska’s Boardwalk Lodge lies nestled in a narrow cove just across Thorne Bay from the community of the same name, which at one time was the largest logging camp on the continent. The lodge is one of only a handful in southeast Alaska currently open in April and early May, when the spring steelhead begin to arrive, and as such, it is an ideal destination for those who’ve spent their winter afflicted by dreams of crimson and chrome. A residue of the logging industry, approximately 1,500 miles of roads crisscross the island, about half of which are maintained. Using this network of gravel and asphalt, anglers at Alaska’s Boardwalk Lodge can load up in a Suburban and access their choice of some of the best steelhead streams in the state. If all goes wrong, several streams can be fished in a single day, anglers moving until suitable conditions and affable fish are found. Over the course of a season, the lodge fishes 23 different creeks and rivers, beginning with the Thorne, just a few miles away.
It’s the island’s biggest river and hosts one of its largest annual steelhead returns, but in a contradiction wholly characteristic of southeast Alaska, an angler on the Thorne is never far from certain feelings of intimacy with water. We began our first full day there.
With Kenji King as our guide, we breached a slight fold in the forest wall and plowed through the tangle of willow and alder that lined the road, entering a world more suited to the pages of a child’s fantasy book than those of an angling periodical. The great giants of the temperate rain forest towered above, their massive trunks dressed in several stages of moss. The trail we followed led over fallen logs and under others; it was nearly lightless beneath the forest’s canopy, but every now and then, though a serendipitous angle, we caught a glimpse of the river that lay ahead. Eventually, we clambered over the last obstruction, slid down the last embankment, and broke out onto a short muskeg beach, where we soon set ourselves to the task of fishing the Thorne.
Where we started the river was about 150 feet wide and mostly featureless on top. Deep, too, and in just a few steps I found myself submerged to the waist. However, a pair of enormous boulders stood in line in the middle of the river, about thirty feet apart, just screaming steelhead. Marcus and I each chose a rock and began to cast.
In Southeast, including of course the waters flowing on Prince of Wales Island, the steelhead traditionalist will find many of the most time-honored patterns among local favorites. Due to the tannic-stained water and a fairly low year-round temperature, waking flies aren’t used to much success—or much at all—but a regular assortment of Green Butt Skunks, Freight Trains, Skykomish Sunrises, and the like will do nicely. Our guide, cognizant of the off-color water, prefers flies with a significant profile and plenty of action, especially during periods of heavy rainfall and increased flow. A number of marabou flies, tied similarly to patterns of the Alaskabou series, and several takeoffs from the General Practitioner dominated his boxes. They’re really exquisitely designed and constructed flies, in red, pink, purple, and deep blue, with enough pheasant-tail accessories and assorted touches of schlappen to make the Glo-Bug and yarn crowd howl.
We put on a steelhead-fly pageant between those two boulders, using flies from both our own boxes and Kenji’s, and still, neither Marcus nor myself touched a fish. With the rain unrelenting, we hiked out, drove to a new spot, hiked back in, and began to work another likely looking stretch of stream. We fished hard throughout the day, moving often, peering without success into the rising rivers for signs of steelhead. Several of the places we stopped were breathtaking: gorgeous black-water pools tucked deep in the ferns and other lush vegetation of the rain forest, a long slot that ran beneath an old abandoned walking bridge, bookend slicks and tailouts that flowed clear and even-mannered through towering stands of western hemlock, Sitka spruce, and red and yellow cedar. In all that good water, we caught nothing. The rain continued to beat steadily on our jackets and only the stark yellow of the skunk cabbage stood out against the moist, muted colors of the wilderness. Back on the Thorne, though, while nymphing an almost impossible lie, and not very efficiently at that, we hooked, fought, and landed a pair of wild steelhead.
As a lodge situated in fish-rich Southeast, Alaska’s Boardwalk Lodge might be expected to present a more varied menagerie of angling opportunity, which it does. In the spring, the lakes and streams are jammed with Dolly Varden and cutthroat trout, both of which will abscond into the salt for their summer feeding. One afternoon, we trekked a short distance to Trumpeter Lake, and near the head of an outlet creek, we caught scads of cutts and Dollies in the 12- to 18-inch range. On the Thorne another evening, Marcus switched over to a small fry pattern and caught a Dolly Varden, a resident rainbow, a cutthroat, and a cuttbow—all without taking so much as a step.
Like almost all of the lodge’s in southeast Alaska, Boardwalk is also geared towards fishing in the marine environment. As it lies on the east side of the island, Boardwalk guests venture into the protected bays, straits, and inlets of the famed Inside Passage, where the emerald waters regularly yield triple-digit halibut, an array of other bottomfish, and the always popular Pacific salmon species. Chinook are abundant from late May through early July, chum in July and August, and coho from late July through early September.
Anglers can fish for sockeye, chum, pink, and coho salmon in the freshwaters of Prince of Wales Island as well. The latter in fact represents one of the most popular fisheries on the island. Most anglers target the fall run of coho, which usually begins entering island streams in late August. However, a few streams contain returns of summer run silvers, too, and these fish can be found in freshwater as early as late June, with July and early August the best times to fish for them. In a few instances, anglers can also target steelhead in the fall and early winter. About 14 Prince of Wales streams have documented runs at this time of year, which means there’s approximately one population of fall-returning fish for every five or six steelhead streams on the island. On the other hand, the cutthroat trout and Dolly Varden are unquestionably thick come autumn, and they can be fished to even greater success then than before the early-season out-migrations.
But to tell the truth, none of that mattered to me. Not even the Dollies and the cutts, not even after four days of steady rain. As short coastal streams are wont to do, the rivers and creeks we were encountering had blown out. Where we’d fished two days earlier we now found a raging torrent colored up like chocolate milk. We checked the Internet for stream-flow readings on Staney Creek and found numbers that bordered on the obscene. Back to the Thorne we went.
The rain, having no choice, continued to fall and we soon regained our acquaintance with frozen fingers and pruned skin. In short order, the act of fishing in these conditions seemed absurd, and possibly masochistic. The Thorne was swollen beyond belief and looked more like a back-flooded lake than a mighty river. It’s an apt description, for Marcus and I were soon joking about the need for a float tube. But it being April and we being steelheaders, even if fattened on filet mignon and pampered with fine wines, it was timeto pretend the rain didn’t exist and that numb was the natural state of things, and that in the end, persistence was cure enough for the world’s ills. I tied on a weighted fly, big and bulky, attached a sink-tip to my line, and worked all the water I could reach. Then I covered it again. Seven or eight long, cold hours later, my line stopped on the swing and when I lifted the rod there was the weight of a fish. A steelhead.
Troy Letherman is the editor of Fish Alaska magazine. [/emember_protected] [emember_protected scope=”not_logged_in_users_only”]
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