We spent 8 days on the Kenai in mid July. We flew into Anchorage and drove to Soldatna where we stayed with our friends Will and Jane. They have a beautiful home on the Kenai river and the set up every fisher wants in a fishing retreat, but it's their home!!
This season the fishing was very hard for the first 4 days, except for Jim he caught a limit everyday. The fish weren't coming in like had in the past, the first 4 days 7 - 8 thousand fish were coming up river each day. In the past the numbers were in the 20 - 30 thousand fish per day and sometimes even higher. The numbers started to get better the last three days of the trip getting closer to 20 thousand a day. The last three days were fun and active.
I caught fish each day, but not always the Sockeye Salmon we were targeting. I did get 3 Sockeye the first few days, that's how slow it was. I fished about 12 hours a day or more depending on how the back was feeling.
Jim on the other hand had the few that were coming up river dialed in. He caught a 3 fish limit each day. The best fish he had online spooled him in about 10 secs. That fish ran out 200 yards of line in a heartbeat. Gary also did okay but didn't limit each day. Rulon had an extremely hard time getting them to the bank. The last three days we all limited out each day.
We thought about going out on a Halibut trip but due to the low numbers of Sockeye and the fact that they completely shutdown the King fishing, all of the charters were full. So we kept throwing our flies and getting what we could.
We did end up with 6 boxes of fillets for the trip home at roughly 50 pounds per box we did okay. We tracked the fish numbers after we got home and they never improved and found out that they put the limit down to 1 fish per day on the Kenai. Sad to see the numbers so low. Hopefully they rebound next year.
Sometime the fish fight back!
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