Fishing shifts into salt gear</MCC HEAD>

Story last updated at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, June 20, 2002

Fishing shifts into salt gear

Casting About

by Sepp Jannota
Staff Writer

Photo by Sepp Jannotta, Homer News
Following a brief but intense struggle with a Fishing Hole king salmon on Tuesday, Mary Jeffers takes a seat and lets her husband Lee help out.

For many of us, the various stages of the fishing season occupy slots on the calendar as hard and fast as national holidays.

For a lot of anglers the king salmon season of weekend openings on the streams of the Lower Peninsula gets circled and all conflicting engagements are canceled.

But now that we've reached the end of that party, Kachemak Bay and Cook Inlet beckon with the promise of a different sort of fishing. For starters, The Fishing Hole is still been producing plenty of bright kings, with anglers commonly using a bobber and yarn or roe-sack setup. The king salmon fisheries across Bay at Halibut Cove Lagoon and Seldovia are also still in business and bright fish should be continuing to show.

For some anglers, halibut is king this time of year and huge flatfish over 200 pounds are not uncommon.

James Mato, a 15-year Florida boy, pulled up a monster on June 10 that tipped the Homer Jackpot Halibut Derby scales at 273.8 pounds.

"It's always good," state Fish and Game area biologist Nicki Szarzi said of the halibut fishing in Cook Inlet. "It's only the weather that gets bad."

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