Silver Fishing

Alaska resident and good friend Chad Hood is a wildlife biologist who loves to fish for Silvers in a special, what he calls secret honey hole in the river. “For 10 straight years, my brother would come up and we would do our annual Hoonah silver fishing trip in September in Alaska. That is when it is the best time to go silver fishing and that was always my number one passion and number one target was River silver fishing. and of course Hoonah has one of the largest brown bear populations anywhere. We immediately see a bear and there are still pinks in the stream so the bears are pretty well behaved. They are just leaving us alone. So we started getting into the silvers pretty good, we are not fly fisherman, we usually just use spinners. The second day we caught another dozen silvers or so but the third day was our best day. I’ve got this secret spot and in a decade I have never seen another fisherman. And we were pounding them. Between three of us we were allowed to keep six fish each so we got our 18 fish and I set an all-time record. We weigh all our fish. It was 14.8 pounds and a lot of people would say that’s not such a big deal but in the creeks around those parts that was the biggest fish I have ever gotten. We had 16 bears that day and one of them was very curious and he was ready to come across the creek. He was 100 feet away from us and was showing signs he was interested. We had to make a stand against the bare and he eventually decided it wasn’t worth his effort and turned around.