THE NUSHAGAK:
Fishing and Accommodations
FISHING ON THE NUSHAGAK RIVER
Off the grid fishing, just steps away from Alaska’s most productive king salmon fishery.
Our Camp
Our Nushagak River camp is located downstream of Portage Creek, in the tidally influenced portion of the river on what many would argue is the best salmon pool in that section of river.
The Food
You wont find any canned items in our pantry. All lunches are packed daily and made with fresh ingredients. Your lunch will consist of sandwiches made with home made bread and garden fresh veggies, home made hot soup, chips, and plenty of snacks.
Fish Handling
The Lodge at 58* North takes pride in our fish handling and processing practices. We bring ice to each salmon destination to ensure your fresh catch is immediately chilled. On the Nushagak, we fly ice to camp every other day to guarantee your catch is in the best possible condition when we are ready to process it.
Fish Processing/Freezing
At the end of each day, your guide will filet your fresh-caught salmon. The filets will be sent back to King Salmon with you, on ice, where we will seal and freeze it. Upon completion of your trip, our team in King Salmon will box your fish in preparation for your return home or next adventure.
Fun fact: We use cloth sheets instead of paper towels to clean our filets. And we are proud to have influenced other outfitters to change wasteful habits by switching over to reusable materials as well.
The Fishing
The Nushagak River has the largest fishable run of king salmon in Alaska, with over 100,000 fish swimming by our camp most years. With these kinds of numbers, we hook and land more king salmon in one day than many destinations can expect to see in one week. Our guides have been fishing this river system for many years and employ a diverse selection of fishing techniques to stay on the fish. Our go-to fishing method is down-stream spinner trolling. This technique allows us to cover huge amounts of water in search of king salmon. Once we find a school, we stay on them as long as we can. Anglers hold their own rods, and get to feel the bite of each fish. At times, the action can be fast and furious, where double, triple and even quad hookups are possible.
Our boats are some of the fastest on the river, we run 200 hp engines on our 21’ boats and a 150hp outboard on our 18 boat. And while it does create some additional work for our team to fly extra fuel to camp, and some extra costs, it allows us to fish a significant amount of water throughout the day, instead of spending that time slowly running up stream. For this reason, some camps have ‘fishing boundaries’ because their fleet would burn too much fuel, or the travel time to each destination is just too long to be practical.
Spinner trolling is not the only method that we use. In addition to their speed, our boats have a significant amount of storage, making it possible to carry a number of additional rods rigged with different gear that we employ when the time is right. It should be noted that most of the fly-out and river camps in the area use small jon boats, which work great, but have little extra storage room for extra gear, so they tend to stick to one technique. Our techniques also include: backtrolling with plugs and bait divers, bobber dogging with light spin gear and even casting lures and flies from the shore. And because our camp is located on such a good run, we often catch fish during lunch or while waiting for the plane with a custom side-planer setup we always have rigged and ready. Our guides use the widest variety of gear available to keep you on the fish.
Fly Fishing
For anglers that are interested in fly fishing for king salmon, we have selected a number of days that coincide with the best tides of the year! The regulations on the Nushagak allow anglers to harvest one adult and one jack king salmon per day, with a seasonal total of 4 salmon over 20”.
To learn more about our Nushagak River experience, please send us an email here.
