Southwest Alaska-Tikchik Narrows Lodge. I’ve always wanted to visit Alaska and do some fishing, it was sort of a bucket list trip. After looking at several lodge options I decided to go with the Tikchik Narrows Lodge in southwest Alaska. It is a complete fly in – flyout lodge. There are no roads for 300 miles. They offer the opportunity to fish for rainbow and lake trout, grayling, dolly varden, arctic char and possibly King Salmon.

The week I picked is a bit of a transition week. Its late for the King Salmon and a little early for the Silver Salmon. You get the opportunity to fish both rivers and lakes with the lodge sitting on a peninsula between Lakes Tikchik and Nagakuk. During the week, I managed to catch all the above species plus one Chub Salmon. The fishing strategy is very simple and is used for both lakes and rivers. Find a group of mating salmon, in this case in the lakes its mostly Sockeye and in the rivers at this stage mostly Chub and a few Kings and drift a bead through there or swing a streamer. The streamers are best for targeting the rainbows and the bead (egg imitation) works for everything. The key to the streamers were to really make sure that line was tight on the swing where the rainbows would often take it and make sure to use a strip set. The bead fishing was tricky mainly because the set needed to be made downriver as much as possible. If you did the normal upriver set, you would not get the fish. The beads are rigged with the hook ~ 2 inches below the bead so you’re really snagging them. So, the set needs to be downriver. The lakes you could fish by getting in the inlets and slay them with the bead. In the rivers either worked well and on some occasions, we would fish a stretch with the bead then go back over it with streamer. Streamers were more effective for the rainbows and occasionally a salmon would hit them.

My favorite day though was when we flew to Lake Beverly, waded through some of the lake and hiked back about ~1.5 to Moose Creek. We sight fished for big rainbow. There were lots of Sockeye in this creek and so we would find them and then look for the trailing rainbow. There weren’t lots of them but them but the ones that were there tended to be big. We used the beads for them, and you had to have very precise drifts and then trying to land them in this small creek was a challenge. We also had some grizzly bear company fishing with us a couple of times. All of the locations were amazing though. Fishing on Kash (Kashaiak) creek in the Togiak wilderness for Dolly’s, Rainbows and the odd King Salmon was awesome and a day of lake hopping for big Char was amazing in terms of both the fishing and scenery. Flying out on those old Dehaviland Beavers was a blast, the food and hospitality at the lodge were awesome and the fishing was just spectacular. If you are looking for a true Alaska wilderness fishing adventure I can’t recommend Tikchik lodge enough.