2026-08-08 Salmon Fishing

My daughter Jennifer and grandson Hayden (11) are in town for a couple of months. Hayden has discovered the salmon in Ketchikan Creek, so it has been hard to drag him away from fishing there. But today I convinced him to come out on the boat for a bit of "real" salmon fishing.

He has made some friends while he has been here so today, we invited his friend Braydon to come with us.

We pulled out of my slip in Bar Harbor at about 9:15 AM and we had a bit of drama on the way out. A commercial troller started to back out of his slip without looking behind him which forced me to stop in the fairway between floats 12 & 13. There was a brisk NW breeze blowing through the harbor at that time and it was blowing me around a bit. Space is tight in there and I was having trouble holding position. Finally, he did see me and aborted his departure to allow me to pass behind him, and we were able to get out of the harbor.

Here is a map snippet that shows our track for the day.

Bar Harbor is near the area in red at the bottom. The area marked with a "1" is near Vallenor Point. We stopped there briefly as I had hoped to start fishing there, but it was just too windy. We moved across to the area marked with a "2" near Pup Island and began fishing there. We just trolled between Pup Island and Tatoosh Island.

We managed to catch 1 nice fat Silver which Hayden landed and Jennifer netted. We had another one on and Brayden played it for awhile but it spit the hook just as it got close to the boat.

The boys got bored of this, so we came in a little earlier than planned. They wanted to get back to Ketchikan Creek, of course!