Kayak Fishing for Alaska Chinook and Coho Salmon: King Island

Photo: Native Alaskan fishermen with their day's catch of king salmon. Note the umiak badairka in the background high on the drying rack, food cache, and the Alaska version of the better known Greenland sea kayak we owe so much interest to.

It may strike the casual observer that sea kayakers fall into two distinct camps: those for whom sea kayaking is a means unto itself and those for whom the kayak is a means to an end.

The former is most content grinding along mile upon mile, stopping and getting to know one another a vague afterthought if a thought at all. Take more than an half hour's break and these sea kayaking enthusiasts become restless to get back into the sea kayaks.

The latter groups are fishermen who could care less about kayaking as sport, and are primarily interested in their kayaks for transport, and not so much for motion as pursuit. Kayaks are an inexpensive tool and use to catch fish. Hence the popularity of kayak fishing.

Wonder how the fishermen in the photo above felt. They fall into a third group: boat for chase, transport, and bringing the bacon home.The photo is from the keyword-rich and deeply meta-tagged Alaska Archives.

King salmon are whopper fish, hard fighters, and swim thick in the water during their spawn. Their commercial fishery is tightly regulated in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, the subsistence fishery on them so strict that stretches of the Alaskan shoreline and river mouths can be fished only by native Alaskan tribal members.

Fish for salmon in the Canadian Maritimes, on the other hand, and you face the likelihood of being restricted to fly gear and catch and release only.

Fishing photos these days, especially those of King Salmon and striped bass, whose caudal fins' shapes are remarkably similar, a broad paint brush good for painting a barn, are of a much different trope than the above.

These days, say for the last century, the focus is always on some triumphant angler cradling just another dazed fish. These fellows seem unaware of their catch, unimpressed by what they've caught, and lack the cigar chewer's gloat. Their expressions are those of kayakers less impressed by what they've done than skeptical of if not mystified by the ethnographic photographer.

about the writer: fishing guide Adam Bolonsky writes about kayak fishing and ocean kayaking (sea kayaking) at Sea Kayaking Dot Net and NorthAmerican Kayak Fishing.