Sitka sits on the outside edge of Southeast Alaska with nothing between it and Japan but weather, and in late August the coho come through in numbers that make grown men change their flight home. Silvers are not the biggest salmon in the Alaskan territory and everybody in town will tell you so, usually while rigging up for silvers. What they are is fast, bright, and completely unwilling to be reasonable about it. A king salmon fights like a freight train deciding whether to leave the station. A coho fights like it has somewhere to be and you are in the way.
The morning we ran out of Crescent Harbor the sky was doing the thing it does out there, which is rain without ever actually raining. Everything was wet. Nothing was falling. The islands came out of the mist one at a time like they were being introduced, spruce all the way down to the tideline, eagles sitting in the tops looking bored and enormous. Our skipper had a thermos of coffee that had clearly been poured sometime during the previous administration and he offered it to us with real generosity.
You are looking for bait and you are looking for birds, and mostly you are looking at other boats looking for birds. The whole fleet performs a kind of slow polite surveillance on each other. Somebody two miles off puts a rod in the holder in a hurry and eleven boats casually adjust course while pretending to check their gear. Our man ignored all of it and ran to a rip he liked off a point, put out four rods on the downriggers, and said the fish would be there at ten past seven. This is an insane thing to say. He was off by four minutes.
The first one came up jumping before anybody knew it was hooked, three cartwheels in a row, chrome and going sideways. Then the second rod went, and the third, and for about an hour the boat was pure comedy. Somebody was untangling. Somebody was netting. The skipper was steering with one knee and coaching two people who had never held a rod in their lives, and he never once raised his voice, which we found more impressive than the fishing. Fifteen or so fish came over the rail, most of them eight to twelve pounds, one honest fourteen that took a lot of line and a little dignity.
By noon it was over as cleanly as it had started, the bait gone, the birds gone, the rip flattened out into nothing. We ran back past a humpback that did not look up and a sea otter that would not stop looking. On the dock a woman filleting fish at the cleaning station asked how we did, listened to the number, and said, oh, so a slow one. We are choosing to believe she was joking.
Long days in the sun call for a hooded sun shirt. See our UPF 50+ fishing shirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.