If you’d like to nominate a steelhead-bearing stream for inclusion in ADF&G’s catalog, you can do it here: Once you go there, you understand why it’s one of the most productive steelhead rivers on the planet, if not the most productive on the planet.” The Situk River itself is unlike anywhere else on the planet. If you really care about a resource - this natural resource, which is salmon and steelhead - you want to take care of that…. “It wasn’t until last days of our trip, after I had caught a steelhead, that it came into light. It’s more about engaging with place, and I think steelhead sort of embody that,” Maier said. “It’s like the river is doing the yawn, stretch, wake up-sort of thing and getting on with the summer,” he said.Įven if you are casting 10,000 times, “it’s not about catching fish. Other times, melting slabs of ice had scoured the bark from the trees like they do in the interior - an unusual sight in Southeast. “Two bears were fighting last fall, shredding the place, and there was the result of that contest,” he said. Because it was early spring, everything was still visible. One of Hieronymus’s most memorable sights in his years of fishing is coming across a huge clearing created by bears on Chichagof Island. Steelhead once ran on rivers like the Columbia and as far south as Los Angeles, but development, overharvest and hatcheries have mostly pushed them out, Hieronymus said. “If you don’t get the water quality, you don’t get the fish.” This makes them pretty resilient to natural changes in their habitat, but they’re still “fairly easy to extirpate, because they need water quality,” Hieronymus said. Some fishermen like the challenge of winter fishing, as well.Īround 25 percent of steelhead in Alaska return to spawn more than once - some up to five times. According to ADF&G, most anglers on Alaska’s most prolific steelhead river, the Situk, fish from April to June (the peak is May). While most steelhead return to their natal rivers in the spring, some also return to their birth rivers in the summer, some in the fall, and some over the course of the winter. (They’re) wild fish living in wild places,” he said. The places you have to go to find (steelhead), for the most part, are not average or boring places. But I think it’s everything surrounding it. Days you throw stuff at them and they do nothing. Though Heironymus is a fishing guide, he doesn’t often take out people looking for steelhead - it’s too different from the average Lower 48 fishery. “The fact that I’m able to … go out and harvest thousands of salmon to sustain myself - that may be what inspired me to get into this conservation, catch and release fishery,” Whicker said. It’s partly commercial fishing, Whicker said, that led him to want to catch and release steelhead. ![]() University of Alaska Southeast marine biology student Nick Whicker, 22, has caught a lot of salmon in four seasons as a purse seiner, but this spring, through a “Salmon, Sport and Society” class with University of Alaska Southeast Associate Professor of English Kevin Maier, he caught his first steelhead. Listed or unlisted, most see fewer than 200 spawning adults every year - though one river, the Situk in Yakutat, has thousands. Heironymus said he fishes in at least a dozen unlisted streams a half hour’s flight from Juneau.
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