On the way home from the Kenai, we decided to take a detour to Bristol Bay to fish the famed Naknek River. I have been looking forward to this leg of trip, because the Naknek is the only major trout river in AK that I have never fished. We fished from 20-22 September 2010 with guide John Kluck who is an independent guide living in King Salmon. Unfortunately, while late September is considered prime time on the Naknek, fishing was very slow, very few fish were hooked, and we didn't land any large fish. In addition, I was quite shocked at the number of annoying bugs still flying about in late Sept, and would have to rate the Naknek as one of the buggiest places I have ever fished! Dang, I sure would hate to see the bugs here in June & July! Since the Naknek is primarily a swinging river, we fished large articulated flies, both leeches and flesh, on 15' sink tips on both spey and switch rods. Surprisingly, while there was a ton of flesh in the river, black leech patterns outfished flesh patterns by a large margin. Since I'm also known as "bead-y Bob" we also dead drifted flesh and beads a few times, but the fish were so widely scattered it was very inefficient to fish this way and spent very little time dead drifting. For such a remote river, there is an awful lot of boat and angler traffic, and since swinging is the norm, most of the good runs always had anglers fishing them. A lot of times, people would park on the "honey holes" all day, so at times the days were quite frustrating finding unoccupied runs. Fortunately, John put in 11 hour guide days, and we fished late into the evening, so we were able to get into most of the good runs. I'm just glad we had a stellar trip on the Kenai prior to coming here so I wasn't too disappointed in the fishing on the 2010 Alaskan Adventure! Given the fact that the Kenai is way less expensive to fish, I'd have to give the nod to the Kenai as the best trout river in Alaska!
For a slideshow of the Naknek leg of the trip, click on the link below
http://ani...2y0PdUUXw?autostart=true
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