How to Handline Salmon from a Sea Kayak in Alaska's Inside Passage

Fishing for salmon from a sea kayak in Alaska: you'll need a few basic pieces of gear, foremost of which is a small handful of specialized lures and a sturdy rod and reel or simple hand line.

For simplicity, low expense and ease of storage, consider a handline first.

To fashion one, tack together a small wooden shuttle around which you wrap a hundred yards or so of dacron line. Do that there you have it, a simple, inexpensive rig that's easy to store and which doesn't have anything mechanical on it that can break or require repair.

A handline's ease of storage is a big plus for sea kayakers exploring Alaska's waters from the Inside Passage to Skagway. Even the shortest rod viable for saltwater fishing (5'10") is too big to store in a day hatch, or needs to be broken down if you want to store it anywhere other than on the fore or aft deck.

Handlines take up very little room, aren't delicate, and can be stored in the day hatch if the weather roughens or the skunk takes your luck. Unlike rods and reels, handlines don't require maintenance that would be tough to find in the Inside Passage towns: Ketchikan, Wrangell, Sitka, Angoon, Hoonah, Tenakee Springs.

Here are a few caveats if you hook a Chinook. Chinook give the tougher battle, Coho the more dramatic.

Strong as bulldogs, with deep reserves of stamina, Chinooks put up stubborn fights and are more time-consuming to land. Feeding on forage such as sand lance, squid, herring and pilchard, they regularly double their weight during a summer. Burly and stocky, Chinook are dogged fighters.

Their flashier cousins the Coho will take to the air as you try to bring them in. With a handline you'll need to concentrate on slack in the line from allowing a Coho to shake free of the hook when airborne.

Here's how to target both fish: concentrate on places anglers and oceanographers refer to as the nearshore tidewater zone, or those regions of the Inside Passage coastline which nicely meet with, coincidentally enough, the within-five-miles-of-shore waters kayakers feel most comfortable in anyhow.

You best choice is trolling, a simple, easy method for a sea kayak, and a natural for paddlers, given that trolling requires constant forward movement. You won't lose time on your way to landfall while you fish.

Trolling is also well-suited for the areas kayakers favor and which characterize Alaska's Inside Passage: straits swept by tidal current, deep channels and passages, bays, points and headlands.

To choose the best trolling spot, look for backeddies in tidal areas. These are sometimes called seams: a line, sometimes faint, other times distinct, that forms along the contour of opposing currents where tidal flow along shore is notable if not significant.

Numerous such spots such as these lie along the coasts and islands of the Inside Passage: places where steep, rocky shoreline is lively with currents and tidal movement.

Rig your gear with any number of spinners first.

A broad class of inexpensive lures, spinners have in common a willowleaf blade which spins around a metal shaft when the lure is trolled. Funky about spinners is their fussiness: designed primarily for freshwater angling, many are small if not spindly and tend to break easily. Buy the biggest spinner you can find. Or better yet, buy one of the related lures known as spoons.

Key is to control how deep your spinner or spoon swims. Paddle faster and the lure swims shallower. Paddle more slowly and it swims deeper.

For Chinook, troll deeper by paddling more slowly. For Coho, paddle faster to place the lure higher in the water column.

Regardless of the fish you target, here are is one basic principle:

Troll on your offside (port side for righties; use starboard if you're a lefty) so that you land your catch on your offside with your stronger, more coordinated hand. Fishing your offside and landing catch there lets you balance your kayak with your stronger, more coordinated foot, leg and hip.

Rigging a sea kayak for salmon fishing the waters of Alaska from Ketchikan to Skagway and beyond doesn't take require much effort or expense. In fact, probably the hardest part will be how to keep track of the ever-changing, sometimes byzantine regulations which apply to salmon in the US and Canada, a complex mishmash that shifts and changed from area to area, town to town, sometimes from one body of water to another.

Although a kayaker's chances of getting cited for illegal fish in waters remote as these are slim, the regulations are in place for good reason. Salmon face a long list of challenges: commercial fishing pressure, pollution, loss of spawning habitat, poor governmental management and the effects of dams and logging operations. So even if that undersized or out-of-season will taste good at the campfire, do the right thing and put it back.

To read more about fishing and the outdoors, see the media-rich blogs North American Kayak Fishing and Sea Kayaking Dot Net.