Alaska Fishing Trip

Last week I went on an amazing vacation! I spent a week in Larsen Bay on Kodiak Island in Alaska where we spent all day fishing and enjoying the scenery. We had a couple of guides taking us out on boats or to rivers to fish who would bait the hooks, clean the fish and throw the fish back we weren't keeping. We had meals prepared for us and fun little houses to sleep in each night. There were a total of 10 guys from the mixture of my mom and Boyd's families and we had a great time together. Getting there was a little interesting as I had scheduled to fly at night and sleep on the plane and the airport. Well, thanks to a little friend called Ambien and Alaska changing their gate on me I almost missed my flight from Anchorage over to Kodiak. In my half-awake state I heard them making the last call to board my flight and took off running.

Once we arrived in Kodiak we took a 40 minute ride in a small 6 seat airplane to the other side of the island. The scenery was beautiful with a lot of overcast skies, intermittent rain, cold weather (well, cold for someone from Las Vegas anyway) and there were A TON of bugs! Anytime you were on shore they were relentless. Thank you to Cabela's for recommending I get a bug net for my face.

During the vacation we saw a lot of wildlife. Bears, bald eagles, whales, seals & sea otters. We caught even a greater variety. While we were trying only to fish for Halibut and silver salmon we were just so darn talented we also caught sea rays, Irish Lord's (a.k.a. "mother-in-law"), an octupus, cod, dog sharks, pink salmon (which were not looking so good as they had spawned), Dolly Vardens, and Boyd even caught a star-fish. We also pulled crab pots which is much easier than they make it out to be on the greatest catch. Although we pretty much just watched our guide pull up the pots. We did clean out our own crabs though which was a lot of fun. The Alaskan crabs were HUGE, too bad we couldn't keep them, but the snow crabs and dungeness crabs were very good eating!

While I did pull in a couple of 50-60 pound halibut the biggest halibut of the trip were 120 and 150 pounders. Halibut are good fighters and bottom dwellers so it takes quite a bit of energy to get them in the boat. The 150 pound halibut put up such a fight that we decided rather than trying to bring it in the smaller boat that we happened to be in at the time and letting it flop all around and hit us to use the 20 gauge shotgun we had on board. The shotgun was VERY effective.

It was a great vacation with even better company and one that I hope to repeat!

Off the back of the boat the first morning.  We had 2 boats and guides.

My first "keeper" Halibut.  
My brother Jason with his huge Halibut. 

The scenery was amazing!
We saw so much glassy water!  We were all wishing we could have this kind of water when water-skiing.
Alaskan King Crab.
Irish Lord A.K.A. "Mother-in-Law"  Nick-named because it has spines and not the prettiest fish.

Silver Salmon
This halibut was the biggest of the week.  You can see the little tiny ones on the ground to the right of us.  Silvers in front of us and even a "yellow-eye" fish.
The river we fished in.  I really enjoyed river fishing even though we were about a week early and there weren't a lot of Silver Salmon in them yet.  
Me and my two brothers.  Dave on my right and Jason on my left.  This was the first trip we did something like this since we were young and used to go hunting together.