2025-06-10 Craig Trip

Michael Youngblood
Jun 17, 2025
2 min read

One of my longtime buddies here in Ketchikan asked me to help him run his boat over to Craig Alaska, and then to stay for a few days of fishing over there. So of course, I agreed!

Here is a map snippet that shows the course that we took. It's about 160 miles, by the northern route. You have to go up Clarence Strait up and around the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island, and then down the other side a little way, to get to Craig.

You can also take the southern route around Cape Chacon, but my buddy had some business in Thorne Bay, so we had to go the northern route.

You can see Ketchikan circled in blue on the lower right, and then Craig sort of in the middle. The area circled in blue off to the left is around Noyes Island where we did most of our fishing.

My buddy has a fast boat. It is built by Munson and is powered by twin 300 HP Yamaha outboards. It is a metal boat with a large open area in front for carrying 4-wheelers, or fishing gear, or whatever you want. There is a ramp in front that lowers down.

Both of us used to work for First Bank and the bank has a house there in Craig that was not in use, so we were able to stay there during our time in Craig. The house has a nice view of the water.

We fished for a total of 5 days, and for 2 of those days his sister and his niece joined us. I didn't take many pictures during that time because I was either steering while he was working the gear or I was bottom fishing myself. I asked his sister and niece to send me some of their photos and videos.

We ended up getting 16 halibut and I think 4 or 5 King Salmon during our time here in Craig.

We dropped our fish off at a place called The Chop Shop each day after fishing. They filleted them, vacuum packed them and froze them for us. A wonderful service!