Kayak Fishing for Alaska Chinook and Coho Salmon

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

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

To fashion one, tack together a small wooden shuttle and wrap around it a hundred yards or so of dacron line. Do that and there you have it, a simple inexpensive rig that's easy to store and utterly lacking in mechanical parts that can break or need 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 and needs to be broken down in two 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 your day hatch if the weather roughensk. Unlike rods and reels, handlines don't require maintenance that would be tough to find in 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 cousin the Coho will take to the air during a fight. . With a handline you'll need to concentrate keeping slack out of the line to prevent Choho from shaking the hook free.

Here's how to target either fish: concentrate on areas anglers and oceanographers alike refer to as the nearshore tidewater zone, or those regions of the Inside Passage coastline which line within the five-miles-of-shorein which most kayakers feel comfortable.

You best choice is trolling, a simple and easy method from a sea kayak, and a natural for paddling, given that trolling requires constant forward movement.

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

To choose the best trolling spot, look for backeddies in a tidal area. These are sometimes called seams: a line, sometimes faint, others distinct, that form along the faces opposing currents where the tidal flow along shore is notable.

Numerous spots like these lie along the coasts and islands of the Inside Passage: areas where steep rocky shoreline is lively with current and tidal movement.

Rig your gear with spinners first.

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

Key is to control how deep your spinners and spoons swim. Paddle fast and the lure swims shallower; paddle slow and the lure 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.