Give me a bridge and a treble: Coho fishing, Downtown Juneau Style
August 26, 2007
So, I was recently in Juneau, Alaska doing a couple articles on what the place has to offer from a fishing standpoint.
The assignment was to do some remote fly-out fishing and then spend a couple days in a rental car, hitting the local roadside honey holes.
One of the more interesting spots was right in downtown Juneau, in front of the DIPAC Fish Hatchery. The hatchery is funded by commercial salmon anglers and raises untold millions of juvenile salmon that are released back into area waters.
Of course, lots and lots of those kings, chums, pinks and coho come back to spawn at the hatchery — and before they swim up the ladder, they mill around in huge schools out front in the salt.
What you get is productive urban fishery, right across the street from some government buildings. It’s kinda short on ambiance, but it’s a great deal for the locals, who flock down to the waterfront when the fish are “in.”
The really crazy thing about the place is the way many of the local anglers fish for salmon there…
Snagging salmon is legal in the salt up there (the local tackle store had a huge stock of lead-wrapped trebles) and most of the folks we witnessed fishing in front of the DIPAC facility were doing just that. They had it down to an art, too.
At high tide, it seemed like half the town showed up for a shot at spiking a few coho with their jumbo treble hooks. The trick was to stand on the bridge (like the guy in the above photo) between the fishing pier and the shore so you could get a bird’s eye-view of the coho. The problem was, there were about 93 bazillion skanky chums milling around and, apparently, it took a pretty good eye to spot the silvers amongst them.
We were impressed with their snagging abilities, however. These guys were damn good. Whenever they’d cast and jerk, they rarely missed. Most of the time, an ass-hooked coho would get yanked out of the water and up the 20 feet to the top of the span.
While it was an interesting spectacle to behold, we wanted no part of the snagging game and opted instead for tossing pink No. 4 Blue Fox spinners with pink hootchie trailers.
Since the fish were still in saltwater and actively feeding, we couldn’t figure out why more people weren’t actually trying to get them to bite. For a 20-minute period at high slack water, the bite was on and the fish devoured the Blue Foxes with reckless abandon.
Eventually, however, they shut off because of all the snagging pressure….can’t say that I blame them, either.
The coho we caught were all cookie-cutter 6-pound silver bullets like this one Khevin’s holding. Not big, but scrappy and would have produced perfect-sized fillets had we bonked any. Notice they guys in the background, standing on the bridge waiting to do a little yanking…
It was kinda a bizarre experience, but also cool in a weird way. I’m not sure I’d want to spend a ton of time down there but it was definitely worth a quick stop.
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