Fishing in Ketchikan - my recommendation!

[mrsa1113]

We just returned from our first cruise and first trip to Alaska. For anyone considering fishing in Ketchikan I would HIGHLY recommend True Alaskan Charters (http://www.truealaskancharters.com/). We went fishing with Bruce at True Alaskan last Tuesday and had the experience of a lifetime. Now I have to be honest and admit that we did NOT catch any salmon, or halibut, but did catch various types of rockfish, a flounder, a dog shark and a large piece of coral (ask my sister how hard coral is to reel up from the bottom!). Unfortunately for the fishing, there were orca's in the area, but they also gave us a wonderful whale watching experience, even though that is not what we originally went out there for. We saw at least one humpback whale up pretty close and several pods of orca's. The most exciting part of the trip was when one of the younger orca's surfaced RIGHT next to our boat. I mean if we had not all been so startled (we were all on that side of the boat watching the pod that was out further) we could have reached out and touched it, literally. It then went under the boat and surfaced on the other side before quietly swimming away. While it is not legal to attempt to get that close to a whale, believe me it was not our intention. Bruce was actually trying to watch them to see which way they were going so we could go the opposite way when this one decided to make an up close & personal visit. After we all calmed down and our hearts started beating again, we knew we had just had the most exciting experience of our entire cruise.

 

While I cannot recommend True Alaskan as a whale watching experience since it is really supposed to be a fishing excursion, I can recommend them in generel. They were GREAT to work with on the phone before hand to get things all set up, met us at the dock as promised and were very imformative and friendly. Bruce was great. When the salmon were not biting (not only for us - none of the boats out that day were catching anything) we went to bottom fishing. While we did not have luck with the halibut, we did catch some fish, quite nice ones at that. My uncle, who was also with us, mentioned later in the week that he talked to several others on our cruise that had gone out on fishing excursions in both Ketchikan and Juneau and no one had caught ANY fish. At least we caught something. We had a memorable experience and I would highly recommend Bruce and True Alaskan for anyone wanting to do some fishing in Ketchikan.

 

Kathy