FISHING
FROM FIELD...
ENJOY AN ALASKAN ADVENTURE ADVENTURE EXPERIENCE EPIC COHO SALMON FISHING, BEAR VIEWING AT EGEGIK RIVER By Scott Haugen
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ith fishing opportunities being limited and/or delayed in California due to the coronavirus pandemic, there is another option amid all this uncertainty: Head north to Alaska and fish with me in August. For nearly 15 years I’ve been fishing Bristol Bay’s Egegik River. While the coho salmon fishing is as good as I’ve seen anywhere in the state, you’ll also experience brown bears, bush planes, remote streams, thousands of crimson sockeye salmon on their spawning beds, and world-class grayling and char fishing. These are some of the other adventures that keep calling me back to the Egegik.
TWO SEASONS AGO, SOME buddies and I flew into one of my favorite remote streams. Since it was flowing more clear than I’d ever seen it, spotting Arctic grayling and Arctic char was simple. We landed multiple char in the 8- to 10-pound class, and I lost one pushing 15 pounds. We also battled the biggest grayling on average I’d seen anywhere, with three fish landed over the magic 20-inch mark.
Join one of the country’s top outdoor writers, Scott Haugen, on an Alaskan adventure you won’t forget. He took this limit of coho salmon by casting a Mag Lip, just one of the many ways these fish can be caught on the magical Egegik River. (SCOTT HAUGEN)
We even watched a giant brown bear chasing salmon and saw five other bears fishing that day. Back at camp, dinner was delicious as usual, and we all shared stories late into the night. By 6 a.m. I was awake and going over my new cam-
era equipment before heading to one of my favorite places in all of Alaska: Brooks Falls. My previous two trips to the falls yielded some of my best photos of brown bears. This time, however, I was armed with two Canon 5D Mark
calsportsmanmag.com | JUNE 2020 California Sportsman
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