Halibut For Hippies | Field Ethos
By Bob Robb “Bob,” Jim Boyce said, “I need some help getting fishing clients. I have the best…
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“Bob,” Jim Boyce said, “I need some help getting fishing clients. I have the best fishing in Alaska for giant halibut, but nobody knows about it.” Jim, an Alaska Master Guide, is a former SEAL who did a couple of combat tours in Vietnam, and one of the very best coastal brown and black bear guides in Alaska. His lodge was in Port Alexander, a tiny, very remote town of less than 100 permanent residents—many of whom were running and hiding from something—at the southeastern corner of Baranof Island in southeast Alaska. The only access is by boat or floatplane, and there are zero services for tourists. I’d been a hunting client of, then helped guide, brown and black bear hunts with Jim, and trusted him unconditionally—but really?
“Better than Dutch Harbor?” I asked. Dutch, on Amaknak Island in Unalaska in the state’s extreme northwest, is legend for 300-pounders. “Serious as a heart attack,” Jimmy said. “I need you to write a story about the fishing here and help me chum up some clients.”
In the writing business, you need a “hook” to sell a story to an editor, a unique slant that will grab readers. I’d been doing quite a bit of research on halibut, so this one came to me instantly. “Here’s what we’ll do,” I said. “Everyone talks about giant halibut, you see pictures of the huge fish they kill all the time. But here, we do it differently. Because about 95 percent of all halibut weighing over 100 pounds are females, and because males rarely weigh over 80 pounds, as “conservationists” deeply concerned with the resource, we’re going to catch a pile of these monsters, but instead of killing them, we’re going to practice catch-and-release—just like those hippie-assed fly fishermen. We’ll keep a couple of smaller fish for the pot, of course. But I know I can sell this concept–if you have the fishing.”
So we made a plan. Now, while we are serious about proper game and fish management and all that, this was not a plan about resource protection per se. We were simply looking for a way to differentiate Port Alexander from other, better-known Alaska halibut destinations. If we could make it sound as “cool” as snobby, self-important fly fishermen releasing trophy rainbows, I was sure it would be enough to get others who had dreamt of an Alaska fishing adventure to open up their pocketbooks and come see us.
Here’s how we’d do it: My wife Cheryl would come along and be the reeler. I’d caught enough big halibut to know how much work it is cranking a barn door off the bottom in a stiff current that I wanted none of that, so I’d do the other deckhand chores. There is a pretty accurate table that equates halibut length with body weight, so the plan was to, once the fish were tired enough, float them to the top, measure them, record the length in a notebook, then Jim would glove up, grab the 500 lb. test mono leader with the gloved hand, and use a gaff hook to remove the enormous 20/0 circle hooks we use. The rig is one I built, with an oversized Spin n’ Glo over the hook to help float the huge baits—usually a slab of pink salmon or octopus sweetened with several herring. We rigged two hooks on each rod, one set to hug the bottom, another set to float a couple of feet higher.
The day was calm and bright, and we motored Gunsmoke, Jim’s 36-foot custom boat, around the corner and into a large bay. Jimmy has fished this place for decades, and had several underwater pinnacles marked on his electronics. The best halibut fishing is always on a tide change, so we anchored up with a couple hours of the incoming tide left, planning to fish it, sit through the slack, then fish the outgoing tide. The nice thing about this spot is that you’re fishing in less than 150 feet of water, requiring relatively light sinkers to get to the bottom. In other more well-known Alaska halibut spots, you’re often fishing two to three times as deep and need many pounds of weight to get to the bottom in strong currents.
We started with three rods out, and then the bite began, slowly at first, one rod going off, Cheryl reeling the fish up, me measuring, Jim releasing it. Pretty soon, two rods were going off at once, then all three. We finally were fishing only two rods, and even then, it was total chaos on deck. The fish got bigger as the day wore on—one time, Cheryl thought she had the world record on, when in fact it was a pair of fish, both weighing 180 lb. Twice she got spooled; those fish were likely 300-pound-plus giants. At the end of the weekend, we’d fished three tide changes. We figured the total tonnage was about 4200 lb. That’s not including the many large yelloweye rockfish, lingcod, and assorted other species we caught as well.
And releasing a 100-pound-plus halibut? There’s a reason that, before bringing any halibut over, say, 30 lb, on deck, you harpoon them, then shoot them between the eyes. They can go ape shit, are incredibly powerful, and those teeth will take a finger off. So when Jim would lean his 6’3” frame over the side and try to remove a huge circle hook from the jaws of a wild, unhappy halibut, it was a cage fight. I’d hang onto his belt to keep him from being pulled into the drink; at the end of the day, the man swore he felt almost as beat up as he did after a day of BUD/S.
Later, over some well-earned cocktails, the story title came to me. “Jurassic Park,” I said, channeling the 1993 movie. “This spot has to be like Alaska was 100 years or more ago. It’s prehistoric.” And it is. Because it’s so remote, and because there are no services at all for visiting boaters, nobody fished for halibut here, except Jim and a couple of locals. The story appeared in a prominent national fishing magazine, and Boyce’s phone rang off the hook.
Time marches on, and things change. Jim sold his guide business, then sold the lodge to the state to house teachers at the local PA school. Port Alexander remains a tiny dot on the Baranof Island landscape, and there are no charter operators to take sport fishermen out. The air taxi service that serviced PA from Sitka no longer does so. To get there today would require a very expensive charter flight, and even if you did, there’s no place to stay and nobody to fish with. And yet, we dream. Jim and I moved out of Alaska and live near each other, and we keep trying to figure out how we could make one more trip to Jurassic Park.