07/27/2025 Three days of fishing

My daughter Jennifer and I and her significant other Virgil brought the boat back from Juneau in record time. We had 3 days until they were scheduled to fly out and they wanted to make some day fishing trips. These were pretty short day trips with limited success so I decided to combine them all into one blog post.

This map snippet shows where we tried to fish on 07/27.

The blue arrow nearer the bottom shows where we started out, but it turned out to be so windy and rough that we didn't stay there very long. We pulled the gear and moved inside Clover Pass as shown by the blue arrow nearer the top of the map. It was not as rough in there, but it was just as windy and that made it very hard to control the boat and to properly set the trolling gear.

All we ended up with that day was one rather smallish Pink salmon.

Here is a map snippet that shows where we fished on 07/28. We went the other direction and trolled the Mountain Point area as indicated by the blue line.

The weather was a bit better on this day in this location, but once again we didn't get many fish. I don't think I'm a very good fisherman actually.

We did get this one nice Silver salmon.

On our last day they wanted to try some bottom fishing, so we went back to the Mountain Point area but instead of trolling I dropped anchor and set Virgil up for bottom fishing. Here's a map snippet showing approximately where I set the anchor.

I set Virgil up with what we call a "mooching rig." It's basically a salmon fishing rod with a very light 4-ounce weight, and a double hook trolling rig for hooks. We put a small whole herring on there. These rigs yield many different types of fish ranging from salmon to many types of bottom fish.

He started out by catching a few Turbot, which is a small flat fish. Turbot have basically no meat on them, so they are considered a scrap fish, and we released them.

Then things got interesting.

Virgil started catching halibut. They weren't huge by halibut standards, but they were decent sized and given that he was using a rather light weight salmon trolling rod (as opposed to a very heavy-duty bottom fishing rod) they made for a good battle to reel them in.

I helped out a little from time to time as needed.

We ended up with a pretty good haul for the day.

Once Virgil limited out, he started casting with a light duty casting rod and ended up landing a very bright Pink salmon.

I've filleted thousands of halibut in my life, so I made short work of these fish, but Virgil wanted to give it a try, so I saved the last part of the last halibut for him to fillet. He did a good job.

It was nice to finish up our 3 days of fishing with some good weather and some decent bottom fishing.