Hello everyone from Hotel Agave, Los Barriles, Baja California Sur!! We are all down here having an incredible time!  The weather is beautiful and the fishing is hot...we have been out a few days now, and are catching Dorado, Wahoo, and Sailfish.  Lodge owner/operator Jerry Shults brought in a record breaking sized Wahoo three days ago!  The giant fish was incredibly caught on monofilament (Wahoo have very sharp teeth and usually require a wire leader) and took 30 minutes to reel to the boat.  Jerry was almost spooled twice during the fight, but gamingly brought the fish in quickly.  This Wahoo is a Los Barriles record!!! Congratulations Jerry!

Big Rainbows!

            Hello again folks, and thanks for tuning in to the last blog of the 2012 season in Alaska!  Despite some nasty fall weather here in Bristol Bay, we were able to find some big rainbows and char to end the season off nicely.   Dealing with a blown out river this past week made things difficult.  We were able to pull three rainbows over 30” out of the Naknek this past week, and they each came from a different technique.  The largest fish, a whopper at 33”, came on the fly however.

Week 11

            Well folks, thanks for checking in on our second to last blog post of 2012!  I am happy to say that we have had a great season, and caught some memorable fish!  Speaking of memorable, the photo included in this blog is of Brent Boone, one of our guests from the Dallas area.  He is pictured here with our guide Tyler Hill, and a fine specimen from the Naknek River.  For all of you out there wondering, this is what 31.5” of Rainbow Trout looks like!

 Hello again from RCL!  Fall is officially here in Bristol Bay.  We are pleased to find excellent fishing for Rainbow Trout to the Northeast, and great fishing as well for trophy arctic char and grayling to the South.  It has become very obvious that the trout and char have been feeding well, as all the fish we are seeing are heavy and strong, testing our drags to the limit!

Week 8

            Hello folks, this week’s blog features Peter and Charron Denker, from Texas.  We were lucky enough to have the Denkers as guests last week, and they were lucky enough to find this 31.5” Arctic Char at the Ugashik Narrows!

            Silver Salmon fishing has also been excellent, with easy limits for everyone on the Nushagak.  Rainbow trout fishing continues to be very good to the Northeast, with sockeye spawning in all the rivers, we can take our guests to a new spot every day for lights out fishing!

Week 7

            It’s Rainbow time in Bristol Bay!  Katmai National Park is now teeming with sockeye salmon ready to spawn, and the rainbow trout, arctic char, grayling, whitefish, and lake trout all stand to benefit.  Small stream fly fishing in most of our many locations is really turning on this week, from the Kukaklek system all the way down to the Ugashik.  Big char to the south, big rainbows to the north, take your pick!

Week 7

            It’s Rainbow time in Bristol Bay!  Katmai National Park is now teeming with sockeye salmon ready to spawn, and the rainbow trout, arctic char, grayling, whitefish, and lake trout all stand to benefit.  Small stream fly fishing in most of our many locations is really turning on this week, from the Kukaklek system all the way down to the Ugashik.  Big char to the south, big rainbows to the north, take your pick!

Week 6

            Hello again from Rapids Camp!  We have had another great week of fishing here in Bristol Bay.  The river here is full of salmon, giving guests thrills on a daily basis.  For all you fly-fishermen out there, we have had some “stupid” fishing for arctic char and rainbow trout in some of our nearby destinations.  This guide was out two separate days this week in which I must have netted 200 fish!  I know that sounds like an outrageous claim, but if you’ve been to Alaska, you know that’s possible.  This week we were fortunate enough to fish with a group that is here for the second time already this summer, and they had so much fun this week that they decided to book another week again in September!  I guess they’re happy with all the “catching.”  Check back next week for another update!

Week 5

Well folks, this week featured the arrival of silvers in the Bristol Bay area!  We have been having some excellent silver salmon fishing on a couple of different nearby river systems.  Also good news on the small stream/rainbow & char front; salmon have made it up into a few of the smaller streams, bringing some excellent fly fishing.  The action will just get hotter from here on out, as with the salmon spawn, the bite turns on!  We expect a wide open bite from now until the end of the season on our smaller streams for rainbows and arctic char.  We also have several great weeks of silver salmon fishing to look forward to!

Week 4

            Holy Kings on the fly!  This past week we had some guests from California who really wanted to catch Kings on the fly.  They had been to different rivers in Russia and Norway fishing for Atlantic Salmon, and for their summer vacation they decided to come to Alaska to try for the Atlantic’s Pacific counterpart.  We took them out fishing to some spots North, and boy did they catch.  Seven on the fly the first day, and ten the second day, by the third their arms were sufficiently exhausted enough to try for some smaller sportfish.  In other salmon news, we have had good fishing for Chums on the fly, and the arrival of the elusive Pink salmon has marked the arrival of Silvers probably within the week.  Halibut fishing also continues to be outstanding.  We should be getting up to the Northeast this coming week, check back with the blog this weekend for an update on the rainbow and silver fishing!

Tight Lines -------------<((-----<

Week 3

Hey folks! Our third week of operation has been full of salmon salmon salmon.  Our camp on the Nushagak continued to produce huge numbers of kings, and the sockeye fishing here on the Naknek has remained strong.  The sockeye have made it to Brooks, and the bear viewing has been excellent at the falls platform, and in the river as well. 

This year, we are proud to welcome to our fleet the Sea Witch.  This 42’ Delta has become our new Halibut fishing vessel, and let me tell you, it’s nice.  Twin diesel engines, deck space for 10 anglers on the back of the boat, and a hull deep enough to handle bigger seas enable us to get anglers to the fish more efficiently, and allow an entire Otter load to fish together.

            Check back here next week for another update on what’s happening at Rapids Camp!

 Hello friends and fellow anglers! Our first week of the 2012 season was very successful and fun.  Trout and char fishing was excellent this past week, with hungry fish gobbling salmon fry, plus some of our fry patterns at many closeby streams and tributaries.  The trout fishing has also been excellent here on our home river, the Naknek, with many rainbows over 20" caught, and a few approaching 30".  On Tuesday a couple guides out fishing their guests for Kings saw a welcome site, Sockeye salmon in the river!  Going out for sockeyes after a great lunch at the lodge produced limits within an hour, and happy guests to boot!  Check back next Friday for another fishing update, plus our fishing report from our camp on the Nushagak!

Tight Lines,

RCL

 It's that time of the year again!  Seasoned guides and pilots itch with anticipation.  What do we have to look forward to?  The season opener on the Naknek.  Wolf packs of gigantic rainbow trout hungrily chasing countless numbers of salmon smolt down the Naknek River, right past the lodge.  The millions of mature salmon returning to the fresh waters of Bristol Bay.  The madness that ensues when they begin dropping their roe.  Rainbows, char, grayling, all competing for the stray egg, each trying to gain as much weight as possible before the long cold winter.  Our lumbering brown friends who tolerate us fishing next to them.  The Harley Davidsonesque sound of Beavers, warming their oil on the dock in the morning.  The roar that signals we are off to another dream destination.  There are many things that we have to look forward to in Alaska, but most of all, we look forward to sharing all of these things with our guests.  If you're booked already, good on ya, we look forward to wetting a line with you.  If you're not, give us a call, we still have a few spots in July and September available.

Thanks to you and everybody else for the great trip to the lodge. We had dynamite fishing, including a day on Moraine that was as good as it gets. In six days of fishing, we had four days where we essentially didn't see another fisherman. The hike-in streams (Little Ku and Chargash) were everything I hoped I shot over 1100 photos.

Space Available for 2011 Last minute Trophy Trout and Silver Salmon
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Few places on earth have the massive biomass surge each year as Bristol Bay and the Alaska Peninsula. What exists there is a rare thing. Millions, literally millions of pounds of protein swim directly onto land to fertilize this entire region. With readily accessible nitrogen pumping into the system - it is no wonder there are so many huge Rainbow Trout, Char, and other species. One of the problems with this kind of numbers is we cannot visualize them in our minds. Flying over the rivers of Bristol Bay is to see the end result of this phenomena.

Rapids Camp Matching Funds Challenge to Protect Bristol Bay

I’ve known Jerry Shults for several years.  The first time I met Jerry in person was at the Newark, NJ airport in the winter of 2007.  We were both headed to the Fly Fishing Show in Somerset.  He found out that I was just beginning to attend these events around the country to raise awareness about a potential threat to the world’s most productive wild salmon fishery (and the trout fishing’s not bad either!).  

When talking about Bristol Bay rainbows there has been a lot of lip service put to chasing big rainbows and how the fisherman of this world decide what, where and how is best to chase them. I am not going to get into the arguments but the small streams of Bristol Bay Alaska have to be populated by some of the largest and most numerous specimens. All tied to the cycle of the salmon.

Some of the best trout bites in Alaska happen when the switch flips over to flesh being a large part of the fishes fall diet. So what the hell does this mean to the fisherman.

A story

A few years ago a writer from a magazine was staying with us at the lodge. He had come to do a Katmai Park/Bristol Bay Rainbow Trout story. I had guided a group including him back in 1996 at another lodge. We had stayed in touch over the years and I was pleased to finally fish again with the guy who holds a quirky wry sense of humor.

It was the second day and we had wanted to fly up to Funnel Creek, situated on the upper Moraine. Certainly a fabled place and worth visiting.

It was a beautiful flight from the lodge near King Salmon to the Northeast end of the lake. Though we saw traffic on the Moraine, the Funnel was too damn busy. Now is when our philosophy shows itself. Our pilot “ Well? Lets go over the hill “. It is early for this other river but I am always up for fishing, not waiting for water. We had a guest with us, young guy and he was in capable hands with Elijah our guide. While flying over we saw that the entire lower river was empty of fisherman. Clear water and had sockeyes milling around, surely, rainbows around, maybe a bunch of them.