Seasons

The fishing season at Big Ku Lodge runs from June 10 – September 23, with all of the lodge weeks running from Friday to Friday.

While predicting the weather in Alaska is a highly inexact science, there are some general trends that normally occur. Typically, June is a warm week that is getting warmer, with some short rainstorms blowing through. July continues the trend – it is often the warmest month of the short season – and as with June, the days are extremely long, often with little to no actual darkness during the night hours. In August the days begin to shorten a bit, normally still with warm days but cooler evenings. Septembers are usually cool during the day and cold at night. If it seems there were an awful lot of “typically’s”, “normally’s”, “often’s”, and “usually’s” in the last few sentences...well...welcome to weather reports in the Alaskan bush!

June and early July is a great month for those who love to swing streamers for big trout. There are no salmon around yet, and often not many dolly varden, either; what you have is a bunch of mega-bows that have ganged up in the inlet and outlet areas of Kukaklek Lake, gorging on the small sockeye salmon fry as they enter and exit the lake. Every trout in the region is fine-tuned to this baitfish migration, and they are waiting and ready, feeding voraciously. The Big Ku, in particular, can offer tremendous streamer action in June, with trout pouring down out of the lake into the first few miles of the river to feed, joining the big resident river rainbows. We love to fish weighted streamers on floating lines this time of year, as the trout are often busting the bait on or near the surface. And because they are surface-conscience, skated mouse patterns can also be productive. Typically around the first week of July, massive runs of sockeyes begin entering all of the rivers. While these dense schools of mint-bright salmon – averaging 6-9 pounds – are tremendous gamefish on a 7 or even 8 wt outfit, it is also true that the last 3 weeks of July are among the slowest trout fishing of the season. There are literally so many salmon, they disrupt the trout fishing! The trout don’t go away, however, and for those who like warm weather, non-stop action for sockeyes and pike, with pretty good fishing for Dolly Varden and trophy rainbows, this is a great part of the season. As with June, the trout are best fished with 7 weight outfits, as they make throwing weighted streamers relatively effortless.

By the very end of July and the first of August, the tens of thousands of sockeye salmon begin to actively spawn; overnight, the fish that had spent the past few weeks disrupting the trout fishing suddenly become the darlings of the angler’s world. Massive lake rainbows immediately flood the streams, joining their native river brethren hovering behind egg-laying salmon, gobbling the endless conveyor belt of free-floating salmon eggs. For the next 6-8 weeks this gluttony continues unabated; trout that weighed in at three pounds in June, might tip the scales at five, come September. Trophy fish that started the game at six pounds could reach the magic 10-pound mark. Inches don’t always mean a lot, this time of year, as trout are often obscenely and disproportionately obese; fish sizes are simply guessed in pounds. While streamers are still fairly effective, dead-drifting single egg patterns dominates the fishing, in all the rivers. As the warmer August days begin to give way to the cool autumn temperatures of September, not a lot changes (except the trout and Dolly Varden continue to pack on the protein pounds). In fact, the egg fishing remains very productive through the end of the season (late September and occasionally even early October), but there is one last variable that occurs as the salmon all die, and sink to the bottom in massive aquatic graves. As in all of nature, nothing goes to waste...here, the rainbows, feeling the urgency of a long winter spent in lethargy beneath the ice with little or no feeding, turn finally from the dwindling egg supply to a seemingly never-ending source of food, drifting salmon flesh. Needless to say, this is prime time to swing or dead-drift small to giant salmon flesh streamers, and as it happens, these trout can be fairly aggressive to almost any large streamer – black or olive are favorite colors. As well, you might try skating mouse patterns again – you might be surprised how many bloated rainbows can be willing to come to the surface to savage an imitation rodent.