Ship, Bird Creeks open for silvers

The two most popular Anchorage silver salmon fisheries open at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, with the jury still out on whether this year’s run will be a repeat of the excellent run of 2017.

Ship Creek has been closed to fishing since July 3, when a horrible return of king salmon prompted ADF&G to close that usually excellent king salmon fishery.

Kings are strictly off limits in Ship Creek for the rest of the season, and any king hooked while silver fishing must not be removed from the water and must be released immediately.

“The king numbers are so low that every single king is precious this year,” a representative of the department said Friday morning, “so we’re hoping people will treat them carefully, not remove them from the water and release them quickly.”

The Jack Hernandez Hatchery on upper Ship Creek tries to have several hundred king salmon to spawn each summer, and produce king fry to restock many Southcentral fisheries.  As of Friday only a few dozen kings had made it back to the hatchery.

The daily limit for silvers on Ship Creek and Bird Creek is three.  There is no closed time period and fishing is open 24 hours a day.

Bird Creek south of Anchorage traditionally draws good numbers of silver salmon later in July, mixed with a plethora of pinks. Once the pinks flood in, usually they also draw several brown bears to the upper stretch of the creek, above the Seward Highway.

Anglers set on catching silvers might consider a trip to Seward, where seagoing fishermen are beginning to catch silvers in the usual spots around Resurrection Bay like Pony Cove.

Sockeye salmon returns to the Kenai, normally over 100,000 by now, are still terribly low, with Thursday being the first day to exceed 10,000 fish on the ADF&G counters.  With commercial fishing still being allowed, it may take a real and yet-to-be-seen surge of sockeye to make the river worth fishing.