A Halibut Honeymoon on the Icy Strait

Published: Tuesday, July 28th, 2009, by the Daily Local News- "Serving Chester County"- (Click for original link)

Tom Tatum searches for halibut on the scenic Icy Strait in Alaska.
(Photo credit: PattiTatum)

Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, Pacific halibut don't get much respect as game fish. They may not provide the epic battles that king salmon are famous for, but this specie's husky girth alone makes reeling one in a serious challenge nonetheless. Imagine pulling up a sofa or a grand piano at the end of your fishing line from a depth of 200 or 300 feet and you get the idea - it's no easy task. And although these fish may not fight like a salmon, their flesh is a celebrated and versatile delicacy. For Alaskans, you might say it's the other, other white meat.

I've spent most of my summers for the past half century fishing for summer flounder here on the east coast, primarily in the back bays of Ocean City, Maryland, but this was my first excursion to the Gulf of Alaska in quest of the Pacific halibut. Like flounder, halibut spend their lives lying in wait or stalking the ocean floor until an unsuspecting meal drifts by. The eyeless underside of these fish is pale white. As the flatfish matures, one eye migrates to join the other on the fish's pigmented "top side," a dappled brown that, chameleon like, alters shades and patterns to camouflage the fish against the sea floor.

Beyond their enormous size, halibut can be distinguished from summer flounder by their more angular, elongated shape. Halibut are also "right-sided" flatfish, which means that what would normally be their left side becomes their bottom side, while summer flounder or fluke are "left-sided" flatfish. Winter flounder, also called sole, are right-sided like the halibut.

Sometimes approaching 500 pounds in weight, Halibut are the largest flatfish in the world - think flounder on steroids -- and some of these "barn door" behemoths roam the remarkably serene waters of Icy Strait near Gustavus, Alaska.

Planning this trip for over a decade, I had researched plenty of Alaskan locales where I could book a combined halibut/salmon fishing trip with some sightseeing on the side. I talked to scores of outfitters while considering lodges in Dutch Harbor, Homer, Seward, and Sitka, among others. While all offered superb fishing opportunities, there were also some substantial negatives - extreme tides, long boat rides, deep water requiring 10 or 12 pound sinkers and electric reels, and a good chance of bad weather and rough seas.

Since my wife Patti would accompany me, I wanted our potentially once-in-a-lifetime adventure to be as family friendly as possible and preferred to avoid what might become, quite literally, the kind of bad trip that an open ocean coupled with rough weather promised to produce - something more akin to Deadliest Catch than a pleasant day on the water.

Then I discovered Gustavus - a secluded village on the coast of Icy Strait just 60 miles west of Juneau. The Bear Track and Chilkat Mountains serve to shield the Gustavus fishing fleet from the rough and tumble conditions endured by fleets at ports along more open seas. A major staging area for migrating marine life, Icy Strait offers world class salmon and halibut fishing along with incredible wildlife watching opportunities.

The fact that we would be fishing in reasonable depths ranging from 150 to 220 feet at fishing grounds within just a few miles of the Gustavus docks sealed the deal. Another selling point for Gustavus, whose airport boasts daily jet service during summer months, was the town's status as the gateway to Glacier Bay National Park. After taking inventory of available Gustavus outfitters, we finally settled on Suzie Daniels, owner and operator of Ripple Cove Charters and the Fish-R-Inn Lodge. We would not be disappointed.

We boarded Daniels' custom 32-foot fishing boat Newt-Tralizer that first morning under somewhat unique circumstances - circumstances best described as a kind of "Halibut Honeymoon" since our Captain, Matt Musslewhite, 34, had just married his new bride, Kelly Moxley, 32, five days earlier. Moxley, a podiatrist by profession, took on first mate chores for the week. Fresh off their wedding ceremony (held in the shadow of the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau) the newlyweds invited other wedding guests to join our fishing party. These included the mother of the bride, Karen Moxley, and Uncles John and Pete Grosse, who all hailed from Texas.

Once we shoved off from the Gustavus docks, our first order of business was to check the crab pot, hoping to score some tasty Dungeness crabs. Unfortunately, we came up empty. Musslewhite blamed it on a resurgent population of ravenous sea otters. The animals were virtually extinct here but bounced back after being reintroduced in the early 1970s and were currently decimating Icy Strait's Dungeness crab numbers. We re-baited the pot and then let the Newt-Tralizer's quiet 225 4-stroke twin Yamaha outboards carry us to Excursion Inlet, site of the Ocean Beauty fish cannery where runoff from the packing operations attract thick schools of baitfish.

We spent most of the next hour jigging tiny, six-hook Sabiki rigs, filling our bait cooler with bite-size Pollack along with a few herring. In the process we also caught and released some Dolly Varden trout and dusky rockfish. Around nine o'clock we headed back to Icy Strait's halibut-rich fishing grounds. Now my strategy while fluke fishing in Ocean City is to drift the back bays while dragging a top and bottom rig with wide-gapped hooks baited with live minnows and a one or two ounce weight, but Alaska's Icy Strait is not an Ocean City back bay.

While halibut and flounder are both flatfish, that's where the similarity ends. Halibut fishing strategy and equipment are something else altogether. Upon arriving at the halibut grounds, Captain Musslewhite checked the current, positioned the Newt-Tralizer accordingly, and dropped anchor. We were still setting up as another boat anchored nearby hauled a huge halibut over the rail. We had clearly come to the right place. Musslewhite rigged four rods with large circle hooks baited with hunks of Pollack and weighted with two or three pound lead sinkers to carry our terminal tackle some 220 feet to the bottom.

The best method, according to Musslewhite, was to place the rod in the rod holder and wait for the action to begin. "If you try to set the hook you'll most likely scare the fish off," he cautioned. "With these circle hooks, the fish will hook themselves." We didn't need to wait long. Almost immediately a rod tip twitched and bent. With a fish firmly on the line, I cranked up a small, 10-pound halibut - a doormat by flounder measures, but a throwback "chicken" by halibut standards. A few minutes later, line began screaming from another reel - a sign that a much more substantial halibut had taken the bait. Uncle John Grosse took control, and after a hard-fought battle, coaxed a huge halibut to the boat.

When larger fish come over the rail, they can pose a serious danger to fishermen. The unabated thrashings of a few hundred pounds of solid halibut muscle can fracture legs and ankles. Some boats use explosive charges to stun the fish before they can do any real damage. Captain Musslewhite prefers to dispatch the keeper halibut with the help of his trusty baseball bat and the alacrity of a Ryan Howard homerun swing. At a length of 5 feet 3 inches, Grosse's halibut tipped the scales at over 120 pounds. "Halibut prefer sandy or gravel bottoms," Musslewhite advised, then pointed out some red scratches and striation marks on the halibut's white underbelly. "Those are from scraping on the bottom," said Musslewhite. "They show that this fish has been on the move."

Uncle John's halibut would be the premier catch of the day. While large halibut make awesome angling trophies, the smaller ones - like the 56-pounder I boated about an hour later - make for the best eating. By day's end everyone had filled their one-halibut daily limit including my wife Patti who cranked up a fat 82 pound specimen around 3:30 that afternoon. Up until this year, Alaska's daily limit had been two halibut per fisherman, but like the flounder situation on the east coast, Pacific halibut fishery management is in disarray and, for the time being at least, the daily limit is one apiece with no minimum length requirement. Nonetheless, we still caught our fill of halibut with plenty of throwbacks in theseven to 20 pound range while keeping most of those 40 pounds and up. In any case, we returned to the dock with a freezer full of fat fillets every afternoon.

Our quest for halibut continued for another two days as we enjoyed non-stop fishing action virtually every hour. Meanwhile, an incredible array of wildlife teemed all around us from soaring bald eagles, gulls and seabirds above to the orcas, otters, sea lions, and vast numbers of humpback whales that summer here. In the end, my own biggest fish weighed in at around 80 pounds, but ultimate bragging rights belonged to my demure wife Patti who, later that week, single-handedly hauled in a halibut that, at over 125 pounds, was bigger than she was. Of course, her angling feat only makes me more determined to return to the halibut-rich waters of Icy Strait in the near future in an effort to out-fish her next time. But of course, I wouldn't bet money on it.

For the Alaskan fishing trip of a lifetime, contact Suzie Daniels at 866-224-8900 or email at RippleCoveCharters@Hotmail.com or check out the Ripple Cove Charter's website.

- Story credit: Tom Tatum, Outdoors columnist. You can E-mail him at tatum2@yahoo.com.com

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