Fishing Report for Prince of Wales Island, July 5th 2025

Sometimes it is hard to believe how quick time goes by when you are in the middle of the fishing season. It is already 2 weeks ago since we did our last fishing report, and alot of things have happened since.

First of all the Alaska fish and Game announced a closure for King Salmon for non-residents beginning July 7th. This came as a shock to all of us as we expected to have room in our allocation with it being 1 king salmon per year for it be open the whole season.

The reasoning for the closure was that the outfitters out of Sitka made a big change to 1-day charters mainly targeting the cruise ship passengers instead of running 3-day charters. This unfortunately ate up our allocation a lot faster than expected.

Not all is doom and gloom. We are starting see some really good signs in regards to cohos with one boat coming in on the last day of fishing with a dozen cohos. We are also getting reports from some commercial trollers who had their King Salmon opener on July 1st that they are also getting a fair amount of cohos. As of now they seem to be mainly located off-shore and have not “hit the beaches” yet or come in to the inside. But we expect the numbers to keep increasing and hopefully we will be able to see limits of cohos here in the next few days.

To Summarize the King Salmon season I would say it was good. Specially with it being a low abundance year we experienced that there was a good amount of King Salmon in the waters off of POW and that there was no problem for the boats to get their limits for the trip.

Halibut fishing is still very good. We are now hoping that the halibut fishing will pick up here on the inside as the halibut start following the cohos and the humpies as they start getting in on the inside of the islands.

Bottom fishing has been good as well. Lingcod demands a lot of catch and release as the slot limit is a very small window of 30-35 inches but we are seeing some really nice catches. Also with our last group we were finally able to to target yelloweye rockfish as it opened on July 1st. This is the first time in several years we have been able to retain yelloweye rockfish making them very abundant. Not only are they very exciting to fish for but they also make excellent table fair.

To wrap up our report, all of us here at Kingfisher Charters & Lodge would like to wish a happy 4th of July to all our guests and people who happen to follow us on social media. We hope everybody had the opportunity to celebrate the holidays together with friends and family. Happy 4th of July!!!!!