Surfcasting Alaska Part 4 - The final chapter

[HalibutHunter]

Surfcasting Alaska Part 4

What to Do Where to Go

In this final installment I’ll try and break down some of the basic rules we use when hunting for locations to find halibut and other gamefish near the shore. Then I’ll cover some techniques for you to try once you’re standing on the beach. Lastly I will finish off with the inevitable ramblings on ethics and answer the prevailing question: “Why has he not posted any pictures of giant fish?”

Where to Go -
So you’ve made the decision to make the trip up. Either by fate, luck or circumstance you’ve picked an area of the state to visit and now your wondering where in gods name do you toss a hook with all this water around. This can be the most difficult question in the world to answer if you’re the type that looks for other people fishing before you muster up the gumption to get out there. You just won’t find that many up here so it’s up to you to take the first courageous steps and suffer the strange looks.
Now, all of this is assuming you’ve managed to put yourself actually near the ocean, if you have somehow managed to find yourself on a tour of Denali or 100 feet down in an abandoned gold mine I can’t help you except to say that you really should have left the surf rod behind because they don’t fit on busses bouncing down dirt roads well at all.
If you’ve managed to end up in Southeast (Juneau, Petersburg, Ketchikan etc..) then you have a wealth of opportunities looking you in the face. As do those anglers that head south of Anchorage several hours to the Kenai Peninsula or across Cook Inlet to Kodiak Island or further east into Prince William Sound. Wherever you may find yourself the real work begins as soon as you decide on a location. Bristol Bay, Kuskokwim Bay and 99.9999% of the western Alaska coastline is totally unexplored for surfcasting, however you should know that boats are recording catches of very large halibut offshore in these areas. This region of the state is reserved for the seriously hardcore adventurers, as it is some of the most remote country on the continent.
Your first step is to start pouring over relatively detailed topographic and bathy (or nautical) maps of the area you will be visiting. This can all be done on the Internet as there are a couple of sites providing nautical and topographic images for free.
What your looking for is the same things you would look for when scouting any fishing location. Structure, structure and more structure, by this I don’t mean sunken pilings or log piles, I mean any dramatic change in depth nearshore. The more severe the better, unlike coastal fishing in the lower 48 where you look for more subtle changes such as dips and holes in sand flats, you want very hard changes in depth over a short distance. When after halibut, ideally this change would takes place over a sand/gravel type bottom, which is their preferred bottom stratum. The rest is up to you to actually get out there and swing a line.

Local knowledge can be used but I must reiterate that tackle shops and charters/guides up here will treat you as if you should be wearing a hockey helmet and be locked in the basement if you let on your intentions to look for halibut from shore. There are a couple of tricks around this but it requires a little social engineering. Firstly you can ask an old-timer whether or not anyone used to catch flatties from the shore in the old days. This one is risky though as you may get the “your not going to try that are you” or the “that doesn’t happen anymore” statements fired back. The next and my favorite when I find myself in a new area near a settlement with a tackleshop, is to ask where I can tell my kids they can catch some flounder. Now if you use this statement and you don’t have any kids around, fear not your still not lying because you may in fact actually tell them where they could catch flounder if they were there. Shop owners and guides the world over are suckers for kids fishing and will spill the beans easily without any funny looks if they think your just trolling for info for your kid to fish for flounder. Besides, only kids would want to catch flounder anyways…. right? This is a valuable piece of information to have on hand as we have found that wherever flounder are found there can also be found halibut predating upon them. This trick also works for Dolly Varden and Cod as well. As some shops and guides can be stingy with info on Salmon they are much more likely to tell you all about the “lesser” species.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about specific locations, only because of the vast scope of unexplored beach we have, more than any need to keep any secret holes from being burnt. I could easily expend an additional 5 articles on just locations we have found fish and how to get there. So I’ll just save that for my book, when some publisher has a small fit of insanity and thinks I have anything worth putting in binding.
This is again an invitation to you the reader to take some initiative and find your own personal paradise. A simple rule to follow is, if it looks fishy it more often than not, is.
Lastly, there is no need to worry about private beaches in AK. They are a no no up here, as long as you stay below mean high water mark, the King of Sweden could own the land above and even he can’t keep you from fishing legally. Although even potential conflicts with private land are extremely rare as the vast majority of the land up here is state, federal or native owned to begin with.

What To Do -
You’ve done the research, packed your gear, herded your way through the security lines with all the other cattle, sat in a seat for hours on end wishing you were an anorexic toothpick so you actually fit with room to breath. Now your standing on an Alaskan beach with a migraine and a need for fish and scotch (this last part I include for my own well-being), your first move is to stop and study the current. Halibut, much like most other fish tend to move against the current. This has been observed in clear water when they are making feeding raids into the shallow water. They always seem to approach out of the deep from an angle or direction that gives them the current in their face and the longest, most efficient cruise through the shallows.
Imagine yourself fishing a river and you will employ the same tactics in the salt here. Cast “upstream” and let the rig work it’s way downstream. Alaska has some of the most extreme tidal currents in the world so getting your rig to work with the current is rarely a problem even with 8oz or better on the end of your line. You should provide just enough movement to your lure to make it appear alive and at the same time keep it skipping slowly along the bottom. Periods of slack tide allow you to slow it way down by only twitching the rig in a few inches at a time with pauses and rests in between, but as stated in earlier articles, don’t let it sit too long or you will hook numerous Sculpin. Most of you are familiar with fishing jigs and the like so I wont bore you with the details on that except to say that more frequent smaller movements seem to work more often than shorter more dramatic retrieves.

The strikes when they come will usually be either one of two types. The first is the most common and the reason I advocate for braided line, this is the passing inhale of the offering. This can come at any point during the retrieve but most often occurs when the bait is at rest. The take is shockingly subtle and could easily be mistaken for a flounder nibble or a crab taking up line. Set the hook on every bump just to be sure. They can exhale the rig just as fast and the larger the fish the more likely he/she is to kick it back out when it doesn’t feel right. You have time so there is no need to get twitchy and start snapping the rod at the first sign of a bump. A small gesture of lifting the rod as you would for a regular action giving movement is usually enough to tell you to follow through with a bit more “oomph” and with a sharp hook this should be more than enough to send the point home. Radical bass tournament style hook sets are not needed to get a solid grab.
The second kind of strike is the stop, this is when you are retrieving the rig in normal fashion but then it gets “hung up”. I say again set the hook, even if you think it is nothing more than a piece of kelp or a stone. Some of the larger butts we have found to actually snatch the rig and sit on it like a two year old guarding a horde of candy. It’s not until you spank him by setting the hook that he will even move.
This leads me into the next part about what to expect we Mr. (or Mrs.) Halibut has taken the bait.
Most often for the first few seconds they will do nothing at all, perhaps too stunned or even ignoring the pinch as sometimes happen when they feed on crabs. It isn’t until they begin to feel the weight of the line that things start to happen very quickly. Your first solid indicator that you do in fact have a halibut on the end of the line, rather than any of the other common bottom denizens, is a very rapid and noticeable headshake. None of the other fish besides salmon in the salt will shake like a halibut. This is usually immediately followed by the first of many long charging runs. Light drags are the order of the day when fighting a green butt from the shore. Don’t even think about laying any muscle/hard drag into the fish until you are sure that you are making regular headway and he has been in nearshore and charged back out at least once (and they will) or you will break them off. Most are shocked the first time they fight one from the shore at how very powerful they are. Almost twice as thick on average as their southern cousins they are solid muscle athletes.
Once the fish tires and you can get it near enough to start thinking about how to deal with it, you start to wish you had brought along a hand gaff. These can be real handy especially when landing the larger fish solo. I carry a 12” short hand gaff for sticking them in the head and dragging up on shore. If your lacking a gaff you can sometimes just lay the rod tip horizontal and try and build up enough momentum to drag the fish up high enough to snatch it by the tail. That’s when things get real interesting as they completely freak out yet again when removed from the water and hanging onto a 35+ pound flattie as it smashes it’s tail around can make for quite a show. Dispatching your catch is a two part process as they are very hardy and even after dispatching will flip tails and flop an hour after you have landed them. Simply give the typical fish “bonk” to the top of the head followed by a cut of the throat with a large knife to bleed out. Never leave an undispatched fish on the shore; it is first and foremost unethical but it is also dangerous to you personally (they can hurt you) and if the beach has any slope the fish will be once again free to swim away.

Throughout Alaska the limit for halibut has been 2 fish per day with no size regulations whatsoever but there is currently a debate taking place regarding charter limits being lowered to 1 fish per day (again with no size) so we are waiting to see how if at all that will impact the limits of sportfisherpersons on beaches or private vessels. But assuming it remains the same and you are now stuck with two nice chickens (average size halibut 15-35 lbs) and you have to get them home. This is a pretty easy thing if you take them to the nearest processing operation (they are everywhere up here) where they will clean and package the halibut for you and even delay shipping it so it arrives at the same time you do. Cost is usually around .95 cents a pound compared to the average of $14.00 or so a pound you can pay in the grocery store in the lower 48 it doesn’t take many fish with meat return rates of 70-80% that of caught weight, to make it worth the .95 cents.

Yep that's me with a little guy, last one of the season this past October.

So why don’t you post pictures of monster halibut caught from the shore?
That’s easy, I don’t keep them. Yes friends it’s time for the ethical preachy part. I think I would be remiss if I didn’t talk a little from the standpoint of an avid angler, fishing guide and biologist who wants to see the resource remain at the healthy status it has achieved.
Sure everyone wants the experience of reeling in the 200+ pound monster and all the glory that it brings but before you decide to kill it, I would ask that you take a few facts into consideration. Halibut from 0-50 lbs are a fairly even ratio of 50/50 males to females once you get into the 70 lb range they are 75-83 % more likely to be female. Breaking the 100 lb mark they are 92% more likely to be a breeding female. Almost all of the giants you see on the decks of the charter boats and hanging from the town dock hooks that folks refer to as “barndoors” are mature breeding females. There are two main reasons not to keep the monsters but instead treat them with kid gloves. The first of which is based in the fact that we need all the breeding females we can, larval halibut fresh out of the egg are free swimming and pelagic. Drifting with the currents in the open ocean they have to surmount incredible odds to become the fish we catch today. The second reason is much more practical, they don’t eat as well. Those of us that live in halibut country where a very large portion of our subsistence diet is based on the fish, rarely keep them over 50lbs for consumption. The larger halibut have steaks that can exceed 8 inches in thickness and flakes the size of potato chips when they cook. Impressive to look at but not very dense and tasty to eat, they really do make for a stunning photograph but you can’t eat the picture, and when you try and eat all that large dry steak you may wish you could. The smaller fish have much more dense fillets and can be almost boneless, which is the reason for the nickname “chickens”. It is like comparing hamburger to veal cutlet.
So my own personal choice was made to avoid killing the larger fish. I don’t even bother to lift them out of the water for a photo, as that would require tailing them (separates vertebrae) or gill handling them, which is not an option with a very large fish.
If you’re a trophy hunter, more power to you, enjoy, the only thing I would ask before you allow the skipper to shoot the monster or you drag it up on the beach is you consider the facts I’ve offered first then make your choice. It is not my place to impose my will only to ask you to think.

I hope this series of articles has answered a few questions and perhaps raised a few more that I would be happy to respond to if I can. More than anything I hope it has inspired you to become an adventurer and at the very least let you know that all the holes still have not been fished by any stretch of the imagination.
Once again I welcome any PM’s, emails or postings with any questions you may still have and I will look for you on the beach in the seasons to come. My best to you and yours.

Additional Info:
Alaska Department of Fish and Game: for information regarding seasons, limits and licenses.
www.sf.adfg.state.ak.us/


A pair of aces for the table



another pair a bit bigger getting ready for the freezer