Our blog, like our business, stems from a deep love of sport fishing. We’ll inform our readers about the fishing, the techniques, and the fisheries resources that are unique to Alaska. The focus begins with what we do at Angling Unlimited – high quality, light tackle, hands-on, saltwater sportfishing in Alaska. The view extends to locations and species all over North America.
Update on the 2020 Season
There’s a lot of “we don’t know” going around whether you’re talking to your money manager, your employer, your elected officials, or the management of AU. Here’s a bit of what we do know: Update from the State of Alaska: Extended Until May 19: Mandate 10: All people arriving in Alaska, whether resident, worker or visitor, are required…
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Angling Unlimited Receives 2020 Best of Sitka Award
SITKA January 8, 2020 — Angling Unlimited has been selected for the 2020 Best of Sitka Award in the Fishing Charter category by the Sitka Award Program. Each year, the Sitka Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that…
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Great Deals on Flights to Sitka in 2020
Fishing in Alaska is a faraway bucket-list dream to many people in the lower 48. A mere 2-hour non-stop flight from Seattle, AU and Sitka deliver that dream without the faraway. Alaska Airlines continues to add non-stops to Seattle from more and more cities across the country, making a trip to Sitka more affordable and…
DetailsNew Decade
Hard to imagine we’re about to hit the 2020s. Our outlook for the coming summer is positive for king salmon. The kings were more abundant and bigger in 2019. The commercial trollers had a good fall of king fishing off Sitka which is about the best predictor for abundance in the following year. We see…
DetailsThe New Boat – Season One Review
We christened Petrel, the first outboard powered AU boat, in the spring of 2019. Shiny and new, she drew a lot of attention at the dock. For many of our curious customers the main question was “why outboards?” Here’s the short answer and a quick review of the new boat after one season: Why: Refining…
Details7 Reasons to Fish Early Season in 2020
Unique benefits to fishing mid-May through June 10th, 2020 in Sitka, Alaska. Kings only – If catching chinook is your thing, this is the time to focus on them. Catch rates are high and hopes of the tyee (over 30 pounds) are ever present. Inshore – In the early season we find kings in classic…
Details2019: The Year in Review
Grades for 2019 Coming up with grades for a season that runs from mid-May thru mid-September presents a challenge. We see ups and downs every year, but 2019 seemed particularly prone to peaks and valleys. Grading the season is an exercise in averaging 110 days of fishing into a single score that will look low…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: September 18, 2019
Final Report of 2019 Season – Saving the Best for Last September offers the widest range of possibilities in Sitka. We’ve seen it all from hard rain, wind and tough fishing to solid action under a cool blue sky. What we saw on September 10 extended the upper limit of that range. The morning dawned…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: September 9, 2019
The past week brought the biggest silvers of the year and a decent shot at kings. After a slowish day of silver fishing on September 1, we experienced a southeast blow with heavy rain on the 2nd which brought excellent silver fishing along with some kings. It was rough, the drift was fast, but the…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: August 28, 2019
Silver fishing is coming into late season form. The numbers range from good to excellent and the size occasionally reaches the high teens. For the uninitiated, silvers reach a critical mass at somewhere between 10 and 12 pounds at which point they go from swirling and thrashing their way fairly quickly to the net to…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: August 20, 2019
Silver fishing has ranged from excellent to picky over the past week. There have been days of early limits, there have been days of scratching all day to get half limits. And, there was Sunday when we had a howling north wind that made for very rough seas and difficult fishing. That was the first…
DetailsAbundance Based Management
Our guests often wonder how in the world our regulations get set, so we’ll start with step one. Abundance based management is a means of establishing harvest levels based on the current abundance of each species. The abundance of stocks of fish, particularly salmon, can vary significantly from year to year. So, when stocks are…
DetailsJuly 2019 Fishing Report Card
King Salmon: B- King fishing was solid throughout July which would have earned them a higher score were it not for the regulations which limited our anglers to one per trip. We found kings in all the usual place nearshore and a fair number out in deeper water as we pursued silvers. The kings of…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: August 2, 2019
Fishing in the last 10 days of July was good for kings and very spotty for silvers. As our season progresses, the emphasis become more and more on silvers and right now we’re wondering when they will make their way onshore in good numbers. The best silver action has been offshore in 300 to 400…
DetailsJune 2019 Report Card
Kings Salmon – B minus Kings made a significant comeback from a very slow 2018 as we continued to recover from the effects of the warm water event called “the blob” which began in 2013 and lasted nearly three years. There were stretches when king fishing got hot followed by a few days of hit…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: June 19, 2019
King fishing took an unexpected dip in the second week of June. It wasn’t totally bleak, but it got to be very hit or miss. On any given day, some of the boats would get limits while others struggled to get one. The general pattern is steadily building numbers of kings in mid-June. Thankfully, we’ve…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: May 29, 2019
We’ve been fishing two weeks now and can say unequivocally that 2019 is off to a very promising start. We’re finding good numbers of kings in a variety of spots along a wide stretch of the coast. The kings are bigger than the previous few springs with an average weight in the upper teens. Our…
DetailsNew Boat Name Announcement: “Petrel”
Thanks to all our loyal fans for the boat name suggestions. We ultimately landed on “Petrel” for the new boat name. We begin with looking at seabirds with attributes we like. Petrels are in group of off seabirds we often see offshore that includes albatrosses, shearwaters, and fulmars. Albatross and shearwater are already taken. We…
DetailsSitka Fishing Report: The Kings Are Back
On April 29, Captains Ryan and DJ spent the morning fishing and brought three king salmon to the boat. They also admit to missing a few bites that were definitely kings. The ocean was dead calm and they found nice size halibut on the bottom while mooching for salmon. They saw lots of baitfish…
DetailsEvolution of the Revolution
In the spring of 1999 “Shearwater” arrived at our dock. It was a custom walkaround cabin Almar that we designed, and she pretty much revolutionized the Sitka charter fleet. Within a few years there were at least a dozen Almar walkaround cabin models in the local fleet along with another dozen or more similar designs…
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