On our third day in Yakutat, we booked a charter through Glacier Bear Lodge and were teamed up with Captain Mark Garcy from the Reel 1 up fish and dive charters. This was our first time fishing with Mark.
Mark is a straight shooter, has a ton of experience fishing both in Alaska and Florida fisheries. He explained the safety rules of the boat, gave us instruction on how he prefers to jig for halibut, and set expectations that the day would b relatively productive for a couple of hours, then the bite would switch off at the turn of the tide. We headed out, all in agreement that we would target Halibut with the back two rods that Jeff and I were managing, while Ed took the lighter rod, jigging for Black Rock Fish and Ling Cod. Jeff and I became part of the crew often, helping to raise anchor when necessary, giving us both a good work out. The fishing started out slow, with a few rock fish coming aboard on Ed's, and no takers on the halibut rods other than a rouge coho that Jeff caught in the last few feet of retrieval while checking his gear. With about 2 hours left until the tide change, suddenly I found my line had moved completely under the boat and was now about 50 yards in front of the boat. Clearly I had something on but didn't notice until I tried to retrieve the gear and found myself royally snagged on some structure beneath. It was basically a crap show from there for a few minutes, having to pull anchor to change position and try to retrieve the gear. What ever I had on had swam forward, under a rock, spit the hook, and lodged it tight into something that was not going to budge. Mark was able to retrieve quickly and get us back to fishing. We started pulling in Black Rock fish and I pulled in a nice 20+ lb ling. The light rod was producing, so we switched who was manning and now it was Jeff's turn and he delivered with a nice 30+ lb ling. Next Ed was back on the light rod and delivered the monster of the day a 50" 40lb ling cod that even the owners of the lodge were excited to see when we returned.
No halibut but we were thrilled with what we had in the boat and looked forward to getting back out on the rivers that afternoon.
By all account the morning had been successful. We were excited to head out to the bridge to see what we could do that afternoon. Let's just say this was a day for the personal best record books as we all limited on the bridge that afternoon as well.
We all did well that afternoon using both the herring mooching method off the bridge as well as simply twitching jigs off of the bridge. I found the jigs to be a great way to target aggressive territorial bucks out in the lagoon with 2 of the largest salmon I had caught on this trip. It is a blast to catch them on the jig in the lagoon because it reminds me of a steelhead hitting a spoon on a river. Unlike the typical soft bite of a coho, for some reason the twitching motion of the jig drives the coho crazy and they literally smash it.
We still had one and a half days left and we were having a blast!
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