Stillwater fly fishing in Alaska is one of the state’s most underrated experiences — and George Krumm, editor of Fish Alaska Magazine, wants to change that. In this episode, George joins to share why Stillwater Fly Fishing in Alaska holds massive potential for trophy trout, and how understanding the lake’s ecosystem can help anglers unlock consistent success throughout the season.
From post–ice-out timing and hover-line techniques to identifying scud-rich lakes and choosing the right presentation depth, George breaks down the essential strategies that make Alaska’s stillwaters so rewarding. You’ll also hear how local anglers can use stocking data, structure maps, and a little patience to find fish that rival the best rivers in the state — without leaving the road system.
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(The full episode transcript is at the bottom of this blogpost) 👇🏻
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Show Notes with George Krumm on Stillwater Fly Fishing in Alaska
1:42 – He describes how lake fishing in Alaska becomes highly productive once anglers learn to read the structure, vegetation, and insect life beneath the surface. Many lakes contain both stocked and native trout, frequently exceeding 20 inches.
3:10 – Krumm points out that numerous productive lakes lie within a short drive from Anchorage. Early in his career, he experimented with float tubes and found that lakes rich in aquatic vegetation and scuds provided incredible action for large trout.
5:07 – Krumm identifies the main food sources in Alaska’s stillwaters—chironomids, scuds, damselfly and dragonfly nymphs, and sticklebacks. He emphasizes that the presence of scuds is often a reliable indicator of a lake’s productivity.
7:12 – According to Krumm, mid-sized lakes ranging from 50 to 200 acres offer the best balance of weed growth and depth. Smaller ponds may freeze too deeply in winter, while large lakes can be difficult to cover effectively.
9:25 – Ice-out usually occurs in early May, but Krumm finds that the best stillwater fishing begins roughly two weeks later when water temperatures rise and insect activity peaks. Early season fishing should focus on shallow shoals and vegetated flats where trout feed actively. To find more, click here.
11:33 – Krumm recommends hover or intermediate lines to maintain consistent depth. He explains that these lines allow anglers to keep flies in the strike zone longer without alarming fish.
13:08 – Among Krumm’s favorites are snow-cone chironomids, olive and brown leeches, and suggestive nymphs. Matching the coloration of local scuds and chironomids is more effective than relying on generic patterns.
15:19 – Krumm typically fishes with a 9-foot, 6-weight rod and a 12-foot fluorocarbon leader. While he occasionally anchors, he prefers wind drifting to present flies naturally across the shoals.
17:48 – He focuses on weed edges, points, and subtle drop-offs, especially where depth transitions from 4 to 10 feet. Krumm adds that anglers should pay attention to wind direction since it pushes insects—and therefore trout—toward the windward shore.
19:56 – Krumm concludes that success in Alaska’s stillwaters comes down to understanding insect life, structure, and patience. Anglers who observe before casting tend to outfish those who rush.
20:12 – Krumm stresses that depth matters more than pattern choice. Trout often cruise within a foot of the weed tops, so maintaining that level with slow retrieves produces more consistent results.
22:28 – Overcast skies and light wind provide better conditions than calm, bright weather. Krumm uses wind-driven chop to disguise movement and break up reflections that might spook fish.
24:36 – Water temperature heavily influences trout behavior. When surface temperatures exceed 60°F, Krumm shifts focus to deeper areas or shaded sections of the lake.
26:41 – As summer approaches, Krumm switches to intermediate or sink lines to reach 10–15 feet. He finds early mornings and evenings most productive when trout feed along cooler edges.
28:59 – Krumm explains that chironomid hatches peak after ice-out and taper by early summer. Matching natural ascent speed with indicators or slow retrieves is crucial for success.
31:17 – He employs portable sonar and bathymetric maps to identify hidden shelves and deep bowls that retain trout through the warmer months.
33:42 – Krumm highlights how noise and vibration easily spook trout in clear water. He moves quietly, uses fins gently, and minimizes anchor splashes.
35:19 – When hatches slow, Krumm relies on natural-colored leeches, fished slowly and steadily. Their lifelike undulation triggers strikes from inactive fish.
37:46 – Krumm mentions that, beyond trout, several Alaskan lakes also host Arctic char and grayling populations. He recommends exploring multi-species fisheries listed in the ADF&G database. Click here.
39:50 – He concludes that Alaska’s lakes rival the best trout fisheries in North America. Patience and knowledge of ecology distinguish successful stillwater anglers.
40:22 – Krumm identifies several productive lakes across the Mat-Su Valley and Kenai Peninsula. Many are stocked and sustain multiple age classes of trout.
42:36 – He emphasizes the importance of studying vegetation, insect density, and temperature. Lakes with healthy chara beds and scud populations often yield consistent results.
44:18 – Krumm recommends seeking out clear lakes with visible weeds and observing surface movement. Productive lakes often feature shallow coves paired with steep drop-offs.
46:55 – For those new to Alaska stillwaters, Krumm suggests starting on accessible lakes and logging conditions, such as water temperature and insect activity. Consistent note-taking accelerates learning.
48:39 – Krumm reminisces about mornings spent casting into mist-covered lakes and watching trout break the surface. For him, the serenity of Alaska’s stillwaters equals the thrill of catching fish.
50:22 – He urges anglers to handle fish responsibly and pack out all trash. Respect for public access and landowner boundaries preserves the future of these waters.
52:03 – Krumm commends the dedication of local fly-fishing clubs that maintain access points and promote ethical angling.
54:37 – Krumm concludes by reminding anglers not to drive past Alaska’s lakes. “Stop, fish them, and you’ll be amazed at what you find,” he says.
You can find George Krumm on his Instagram here.
Top 10 tips
- Don’t overlook Alaska’s stillwaters.
- Understand what trout feed on.
- Focus on timing after ice-out.
- Prioritize depth over color.
- Retrieve slowly and consistently.
- Adjust to seasonal temperature changes.
- Use maps and electronics for precision.
- Turn to leech patterns when hatches slow.
- Practice stealth and patience.
- Protect Alaska’s stillwater resources.
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Full Podcast Transcript
Episode Transcript
WFS 836 Trancript – October 25, 2025
00:00:00 Dave: Today we’re diving into Alaska s hidden frontier. It’s still waters. Today you’re going to find out how to approach still waters across the state, why so many anglers overlook them, and how to find trophy trout in places most people drive right past. By the end of this episode, you’re going to get a roadmap for fishing. Alaska’s still waters like a local, and you’re going to get a new appreciation for why lake fishing might be the next big thing up north. This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast, where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip, and what you can do to give back to the fish species we all love. George Crum, editor of Fish Alaska magazine, joins us today to break down his background and experience fishing still waters across Alaska’s south central area. You’re going to learn how to find and use digital mapping to find big trout, why trout respond differently in cold northern lakes, and how it’s different from down in the lower forty eight, and what setups George trusts when he’s hunting giants across the Mat-su Valley. Plus, we’re going to dig into why lake fishing deserves more attention from serious fly anglers and how it’s shaping Alaska’s future and fisheries. Here we go. Let’s dig into it, George Crumb. You can find him at fish Alaska Magazine.com. How’s it going, George?
00:01:17 George: Oh, it’s going great. Good to be here, Dave. Thank you.
00:01:20 Dave: Yeah. Thanks for coming back here. We, uh, had you on. It’s been about a year, I think episode six hundred seventy four, where we kind of did a little bit of an overview of, uh, kind of the Grand Slam. We talked about catching, uh, some different species around Alaska today. We’re going to get into one of my other loves is Stillwater fishing. And, um, you know, I think that’s maybe something that gets left out a little bit. I think a lot of people are thinking about salmon. Maybe they’re thinking about catching a big fish on the NAC, NAC or something like that. But lakes have big fish, too. Is that true? Maybe. Tell me that. Do you do a lot of Stillwater and stream fishing?
00:01:54 George: I do, and I have to tell you, man, the best way I can describe the lake. Fishing in south central Alaska is Alaska’s best kept secret. It’s really good. And you’re right, people, both tourists and Alaska residents, are hyper focused on salmon and bottomfish. And they they drive right past all these lakes. And it’s it’s a real shame. And and there’s I have so much I can tell you. I started fishing in the lakes in nineteen ninety four, and I really started fishing them a lot around two thousand or so, somewhere in there. And part of the reason was I, you know, when I moved to Alaska, I thought I was going to find something akin to Ralph Wahl’s Shangri-La in the streams in Alaska. But that was not the case. It really wasn’t. I mean, the really good ones, aside from the Kenai, of course, are hard to get to, and the road system only gets you to so many places. And they got discouraged with all the salmon allocation battles and the declining runs and that sort of thing. You know, with lakes, you don’t have any of that stuff. There’s a whole bunch of them in south central Alaska. I think in the Wasilla area, what we call the the Mat-su Valley, there’s roughly eighty five lakes that are stocked by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. There are at least fifteen or so wild fish lakes that are not stocked and just have self-sustaining wild populations of fish. Many of these lakes you can drive right up to, there may be houses all the way around the lakes. You go out there and nobody’s fishing. There’s nobody fishing. I’m out there on my float tube by myself. And what’s really cool about it is, uh, in most of these lakes, it’s not like the lower forty eight where if you go to Washington or Oregon and you go to a popular fishing lake on opening day, it’s crowded. Three weeks later, there aren’t many fish left because they’ve all been harvested. And these lakes in Alaska, you’ll have multiple age classes of fish in virtually all of them. And some of these lakes are productive enough to to produce fish up to that holy grail. Thirty inch size range. So it’s it’s fantastic fishing.
00:03:59 Dave: No kidding. So you can get something. That’s always the interesting thing because with Alaska, you know we’ve talked a lot about this that these rainbows especially get giant because they’re eating meat, you know and all that stuff. But but in the lakes you know in lakes I guess down maybe in the lower forty eight, some of these lakes in the desert and stuff, there’s tons of food. But how are they getting big? Is there lots of food or how is that working? How are those big fish getting big up there?
00:04:22 George: That’s a really good question. I’m going to tell you. I’m going to answer that from a couple different angles. First, I will tell you that the lakes in which I catch the biggest fish tend to be stocked lakes. And of those stocked lakes, the lakes where I catch the biggest fish, they tend to stock them as fingerlings. So they’re, you know, two and a half inches long, two inches long, something like that. They’re very small. They grow up in the lake and the school of hard knocks and the ones that survive end up acting very much like a naturally produced fish and they are difficult to catch. They’re sensitive to their environment, and you can’t just go plowing through there and expect them to bite. They’ll just stop biting. If if they know that you’re around and you’re making a bunch of noise and that sort of stuff. So first, stock lakes are producing the biggest fish, particularly those that are stocked with fingerlings. The second thing I’ll say is these lakes are not all the same water chemistry wise and productivity wise, and they’re not exactly like the lakes of the high desert that produce big fish in the lower forty eight. The food sources are very similar. And I will say this as far as food sources, if you find a lake in Alaska that has gamma ray scuds, it tends to produce very large fish faster than other lakes. And that’s a clue for you. I won’t tell you which ones those are. You can go out and stain them yourself.
00:05:46 Dave: We’ll figure it out. Yeah, Scuds. But Scuds are a key food item in the lake.
00:05:51 George: For for the lakes that have very large fish. They also tend to have gamma ray scuds. Now, all the Stillwater foods that you see in the lower forty eight are are common up here. You’ve got a lot of chironomids. Um, what you don’t have up, you have damselfly nymphs, dragonfly nymphs. You have, uh, sticklebacks, which are forage fish that can be confounding at certain times of the summer, like August. Uh, what you don’t see up here are many mayflies. Very few. You won’t see a giant callibaetis hatch up here over the course of a summer. Uh, even back when I was fishing, there was a period of my life where I was doing commercial real estate, and I think I was fishing more than I was doing real estate. But even back then, when I was on the lakes every other day, it seemed like you rarely saw mayfly. You might see one or two pop up during the course of a day, but very few. It’s a, you know, the other food sources that are common to Stillwater. These fish tend to key in on.
00:06:44 Dave: Gotcha. So it’s those other ones. And and do you have just kind of checking in here? We, uh fish Alaska magazine is the magazine that you’re the editor on, right? We talked about that in the last one. What is there? Do you have any content there where people could follow up after this episode where you talk about Stillwaters?
00:07:02 George: Sure. You can go to our website and do a search for articles, and if you’re a subscriber, you can view every article that we’ve ever produced. I think if you’re not a subscriber, you can view a selection of them. And if you do a search on Stillwater or something like that, you should be able to get something to pull up. But I’ll also add that I actually wrote a column in the magazine called Stillwater for nine years, basically starting in twenty twelve. And, uh, since then, you know, you can only do something like that for so long before the material starts to get old and you’re going to be rehashing the same stuff. So we switched it to just fly fishing after that nine year period. And I still write that one.
00:07:41 Dave: There you go. So that’s it. So and then also so let’s just take it back a little bit to uh, step back in south central Alaska. Can you describe the boundaries of where South Central is.
00:07:51 George: Sure. South Central Alaska is basically the Anchorage area. I think the most populated area, the area with the most roads. And um, if you were to try to define it, I would put the northernmost boundary somewhere up near Talkeetna, probably not quite that far. And to the south we’ll go all the way down to Kenai Nikiski area.
00:08:15 Dave: Okay. That’s it. And then and then pretty much if you go east or west, you’re running out of roads, right? Or. Well, if you go west, there’s not a lot of roads that go that way. Right.
00:08:23 George: Yeah. There’s there’s water.
00:08:25 Dave: Yeah. It’s just water.
00:08:26 George: At least in the Anchorage area it’s water. And uh, you know, as you as you get farther north past Wasilla, then, you know, you can go west and there are some more lakes over there that are still part of the same area that I’m talking about. It’s a big area, you know, there’s a lot of lakes and it’s easy if you have the energy. You’re a young guy, you can fish three or four lakes in a day. Now granted, some of these lakes are big enough that you’re not going to fish the whole lake and you’re not going to figure the entire lake out. Figure it out. Lakes is tough, but you can drop into three or four lakes in a day because they’re pretty close together.
00:08:59 Dave: And when you let’s just take a lake. I mean, are there lots of different sizes? Do you have a specific size of lake that you like to fish out there?
00:09:08 George: Um, I don’t fish the really tiny lakes very much because I think that they’re limited from a productivity standpoint and can only produce so many fish. And the chance of getting a real whopper out of some of the tiny lakes is pretty slim. I’m looking at lakes that are basically fifty acres or bigger. Uh, some of these lakes are much bigger than that, but, uh, a lot of them are in the, I don’t know, one hundred and fifty, two hundred acre size probably.
00:09:33 Dave: Yeah. Gotcha. And what is it like maybe talk about the fishing you mentioned a little bit Chironomids. What is the technique you’re using most often? We were just talking to somebody there or somebody on another episode that was talking about fishing. We didn’t get into it real deep, but he fishes. mouse patterns and just stuff on the surface and he says, man, you can do awesome with stuff on the surface. But I hadn’t heard about that. But what are you doing out there in Alaska?
00:09:55 George: That’s a good question. Um, I like to catch big fish. I like to catch a lot of fish too. But more, I like to catch big fish more than I like to catch a lot of fish. I think if you were to fish. I know for a fact that if you fish some of these lakes, especially the ones that are heavily stocked with catchable with dry flies, you can catch a bunch of small fish. But the big fish don’t show themselves very often. Every once in a while you’ll see one role, but I don’t think it’s a feeding behavior. I think maybe he’s trying to capture some air for his air bladder or something like that, but they just you don’t see the big fish show themselves? Very much. So. I’m fishing subsurface about ninety nine percent of the time, sometimes close to the surface, but not usually. Usually I’m down there a ways, and what I’m using for fly lines, um, and flies changes throughout the seasons. lakes are really dynamic. Most people don’t think about that. I mean, the lake is not moving. There’s no current seams or any of that stuff. But underneath, things are changing daily, day by day. So early in the season, the ice goes out. A lot of people blindly state that, oh, right after the ice out, that’s the time you want to be there. Well, not in my not in my experience. What I have experienced over years of fishing these lakes up there is it takes a few weeks for the food chain to really get ramped up, and the water temperatures to come up enough for rainbow trout metabolism to really kick into high gear. So I like the period from about two weeks after I saw it on. And when I start, I’m using usually fishing fairly shallow, shallow water from four to maybe seven feet deep. I’m looking for Potamogeton weed beds, chara weed beds, which tend to provide a good habitat for food sources, and oxygen, of course. And those weed beds won’t be very tall. There will be some leftover strands from the previous year, but they won’t be very tall early in the season. But the fish will be there, and I’m usually fishing a hover line or a floating line with a small generic buggie nymph, or a booger, or an indicator Necron. Early in the season, and I’ll do that from when the ice goes out, which is which averages in this area of the state that we’re talking about, the ice goes out on these lakes on average about May six, may seven. Sometimes it’s two weeks earlier than that, sometimes it’s a little bit later than that. So if I were planning a trip, if you’re thinking you want to do this, this is a great do it yourself trip. I would plan for May fifteenth or later. Make sure the ice is off.
00:12:25 Dave: Yep. Perfect. So May fifteenth. So ice is off and then you start getting some action. And then, um, when do you think is is there a prime time or talk about the rest of the season?
00:12:35 George: May fifteenth to June tenth is a really hot time period. Uh, after June tenth, things are changing. The chironomids the big push of corona. And not all lakes up there get big chironomid hatches, but the fish know what they are in all the lakes and they rarely pass one up. But the big chironomid hatches will taper off dramatically by the time you start getting into June. And what takes their place are damselflies. Damselflies start migrating. In early June, water temperatures begin to rise and the fish spend less time in that four to six foot range. They’re starting to patrol out, more like the five to nine foot range. And those fish, they’re not always in one place, and not every fish in the lake is doing the same darn thing, so you can catch them a variety of different ways. I tend to fish areas that I think are good feeding areas for trout. I’ll call it the fishes dining room and I try not to go plowing through there. I try to approach it from the perimeter and I cast into it. Those areas are hard to learn. If you don’t know them, you’ll have to find them somehow. And you do that by time on the water. Sometimes you’re trolling through it and you start noticing that you catch certain fish in certain places, but you have to find those areas anyway. If I, you know, five to seven feet, five to nine feet, when we start getting into June, watch for the damselfly migration. And the damselflies in most lakes in Alaska act a little bit differently than they do, um, say in the high desert areas and some of these high desert areas. The damselflies will swim to the surface, then they’ll swim towards shore. Oh, here you’ll see some swimming around near the surface, but most of them swim near the bottom, or crawl along the bottom and crawl out on vegetation. So it’s a little bit different, um, behavior in my experience.
00:14:19 Dave: Yeah. Okay. And what is the maybe what’s a damselfly pattern you’re using. And talk about how you might fish that one.
00:14:26 George: I tie most of my flies that I fish and, uh, any commercially tied damselfly will work, but what I typically use is tied on a short shank hook. Fairly small, like a ten or twelve. Probably a twelve. It has a marabou tail, a dubbed body with a rib, and it has eyes.
00:14:44 Dave: Right. And this is a nymph. This is kind of a nymph pattern.
00:14:47 George: This is damselfly nymph pattern. And it’s very simple, very suggestive. It’s not an exact replica. The color is kind of important. Damselfly nymphs vary from body of water, but amberish green sort of ginger colored is a good color up. In Alaska you see a lot of ginger colored. We also have some damselflies that are very dark in color. In the water they look almost brown or maroon, but when you pull them out of the water, they look a little bit different. They don’t look quite that dark. But there are some of those.
00:15:16 Dave: Okay. Yeah, damsels are interesting. Not a pattern. I fished a ton because they’re not really that frequent in streams, right? They’re more known as a lake pattern.
00:15:25 George: Yeah, they’re a lake pattern and they are an important one. They’re a good source, you know, they’re pretty good size nymph. And and the fish like them.
00:15:32 Dave: So if it is in that June period and you’re fishing damsels talk about how you’re efficient. So you’re looking for kind of the shoal area those kind of shallower.
00:15:42 George: Yeah I’m definitely looking for the shoal areas and in some cases the shoreline areas. I’m looking for clues like in the lower forty eight when there’s a heavy damselfly migration in progress. Because a lot of those lakes, the damselflies come to the surface and then swim towards shore. You’ll see a lot of surface activity, fish boiling and and eating them. We don’t see quite as much of that. Like I said, in Alaska, the fish tend to stay below the surface of big fish. But I am watching for that. And I mean in lakes, because you don’t have current streams and spawning sockeyes, you need every clue that you can get. And if you do happen to see a big fish role, say, you know, forty yards over that way, well, that fish is there. He’s there for a reason. If it was me, that’s that’s my clue. It might be the only clue you get that day. I’m probably going to go over that way and carefully fish that area. Because if I don’t disturb that fish, I can probably catch him because fish and lakes are opportunistic, and one of the really cool things about Alaska in these lakes is they get so little fishing pressure that the fish are not extremely educated. You know, when you start talking about the Kamloops area, BC or these lakes in eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, you go to Lake Louise in eastern Washington, and there’s twenty float tubes out there. The fish start getting smart, not in the lakes on fishing up in Alaska. I mean, you could use any generic Chironomid pattern during acronym, acronym Hatch, and you’re probably going to catch fish. In fact, I’ll elaborate on that. The chironomid pattern that I use the most in Alaska is a simple snow cone ice cream cone, black with a red rib white bead that’ll catch fish in any chironomid hatch in Alaska because they’re just not that sophisticated. I’ll add this if the average size bug that’s coming up is a size fourteen, I’m going to use a size twelve every time. It’s not a good match, but it stands out from the crowd.
00:17:37 Dave: Right, right, right. That’s a good tip. So okay, this is good. And you mentioned Kamloops, which is always good because we’re doing some some stuff down there. And I always think of Kamloops and some of that areas as places that have some of these trophy fish. But you also sounds like in Alaska you have some of these. So your best method for finding some of these bigger fish is you’re looking for them. If they’re making if they’re showing themselves, is that the most effective way to find some of these big fish?
00:18:02 George: Once you’re on the water, it’s important to keep your eyes open and to do that. But before you ever get to the water, there are things that you can do to help yourself. Like if I was down in the lower forty eight and I’m planning, I think, you know, I heard George’s podcast, this sounds really good. I want to do it. Yeah. Well, go to a website called the Alaska Lakes Database. It’s put out by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. They call it all that for short. Aldi Alaska Lakes database. In there you can see all the lakes that are stocked, all the lakes that are not stocked. You can see some lakes that were previously stocked. If you pull up and click on that particular lake, you can get some additional information like when it was stocked, what was stocked, what was the average size fish that was stocked, how many were stocked? And in addition to that, a lot of these lakes have granted they’re relatively crude, but they have bathymetric maps that you can look at. And if you look at these bathymetric maps with just a little bit of experience, you can figure out where the weeds are going to be in these lakes. You can see the shoal areas by the, you know, wide spaced out, um, contour lines. And those contour lines are important. I like to see I like to see a fairly wide, broad shoal area with a drop on the edge of it. And most of the time when I’m fishing these, I’m going to be out there over the drop somewhere, and I’m casting towards the shoal. When you get on the water, you may have to modify that approach depending on which way the wind is blowing, but blowing. But that’s what I’m going to do. And I tell you, learning lakes is very difficult. I, I, I don’t know how many thousands of hours I’ve spent on, on these lakes and I’m talking about. But it’s a lot. And learning them, I gotta tell you, when I was first starting to do it, I was trolling a lot. I put on a booger and I just start trolling.
00:19:49 Dave: That’s right. Old trolling method.
00:19:51 George: Yep.
00:19:51 Dave: And which which works, right? Which can work.
00:19:53 George: But yes, you will. You will catch fish, especially in Alaska. And you can catch some big fish. Tuna. I can remember this one lake I’m trolling along the shoreline, the waters between five and seven feet. I’m using a floating line. And at the time, because there were some rather large leeches in some lakes, I was using a booger pattern that, although it was tied on like a size six hook, it was probably three inches long. I mean, it was a big booger, and, uh, I caught some giant fish doing that. It wasn’t so much that I was a great fisherman, but what that pointed out to me is I noticed I was catching these fish over and over again in the same general locations. So I began to learn where those dining rooms were, if you will. And at certain times of the year they go to different dining rooms. But, you know, if you take good notes, you’ll know that in this lake I need to be in this area at this time of year, and the fish are going to be in five to seven feet of water, and then you don’t have to troll through them. You can be out there on the perimeter and cast them. I will say this once I started locating some of those areas and I stopped trolling and I started casting to cover the water and quit moving through where the fish were, I started catching many more fish and bigger fish.
00:21:01 Dave: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think that’s the challenge with trolling, is that you’re a lot of times kicking. Well, if you’re in a or rowing through the water where the fish are before your fly gets there.
00:21:11 George: That’s true. And they move. And I don’t think they fish. Like I said, these fish don’t get the pressure they get in other places, but they’re they’re still sensitive to their environment. And when they get disturbed, everything stops for a while. They don’t necessarily leave that zip code, but they stop doing what they’re doing. They move away from the disturbance and the chance of getting bit goes down a little bit.
00:21:30 Dave: Okay. So go back on the damsel. So when you’re fishing that damsel you got your pattern. You got your sounds like hover dry line. Are you casting out letting it sink. Talk about that how you’re fishing those.
00:21:40 George: Yeah. If I’m fishing a damsel and let’s say, you know, depending on water temperature, it could be as shallow as four feet. I could, you know, the water that I’m targeting, or it could be as deep as six or seven feet. I’m going to cast it out with that hover line, and I am going to let it sink. And my damsel patterns are not heavily weighted. They’re usually unweighted or barely weighted. I don’t want them sinking faster faster than my fly line. Ideally, if I could make my fly sink at exactly the same rate of my fly line, that’s that’s what I would want to do. Because then everything is straight. And if a fish breathes on your fly, you can feel it. I’m going to cast out. I’m going to let it sink the appropriate amount. If I’m really being technical, I’ll actually count in seconds in my head how long I’m letting it sink so I can keep track. Then I’m going to begin to retrieve and retrieve should be slow. Slow? These critters in the water are not. They’re not racehorses. Most people retrieve far too fast, and you’ll still catch some fish with a fast retrieve. You’ll get a fish that is in the mood to chase, you know, and you’ll get a reaction bite. But generally, these fish, these bugs are moving very slowly. And that’s why I like the hover line. It just kind of melts into the water, and it takes forever for it to get to the bottom in five feet of water. That’s what I want. I want that thing sinking so slowly that I can fish. You know, let’s say I made a fifty or sixty foot cast. It might take me a minute or more to get that fly back to me, and I won’t catch the weeds. That’s what I want. Because I will say this. Although these fish are not pressured, you get just a little bit of weeds or debris on your fly and they won’t bite it.
00:23:14 Dave: That’s right. Yeah. How do you avoid that? That seems like a challenge of. And how do you know? I guess you know when you get something on. But how do you avoid getting the weeds on your fly?
00:23:22 George: Well, fishing with that hover line in that shallow water helps a lot. Fishing with an unweighted fly house a lot. It’s better that for the fly to be in the water column doing nothing than it is to be winding up in the weeds.
00:23:33 Dave: Yeah, I guess that’s what you could do. You make your cast and you kind of trial and error. So. So you make your cast out there, um, into the shoulder where you think the fish might be, and then you slowly. And is the strip kind of like, um. Describe that. It’s like about as slow as you can pull it, just like slow, you know. How would you describe it?
00:23:51 George: Yeah, it’s pretty slow. And if you watch a damselfly, uh, nymph swim, you cannot imitate that very well. Okay. They they wiggle side to side and you can put a bead head on it, and that’s going to make it wiggle up and down, but you’re going to have to fish it a little faster because that bead is going to make it sink. And again you don’t want to catch weeds. Your downtime is your enemy. So um, when I’m typically doing is I’m doing a hand twist retrieve, uh, kind of slow. And, uh, every once in a while, I’ll give it a quick snap. It’s not really a strip, it’s I’m using my fingers to instead of hand twist it slowly, I’m doing a quick one or two hand twists. I mean, it’s a very quick one, two.
00:24:32 Dave: Okay.
00:24:32 George: And that’s basically just me trying to make the fly say, look at me.
00:24:37 Dave: Yeah. So you’re doing so you’re doing some slow, mostly slow retrieves, but then you might switch in a little quick twitch to make it give it some life.
00:24:43 George: That’s right. And it’s just saying, hey, look at me, look at me, you know. And then back to the normal, slow retrieve. Efficient Stillwater. You know, they have all the time in the world to inspect your fly. And I think I think that they do sometimes. And if you start moving it too fast, they just turn away and look for the next bug to eat. So we want something to get their attention, but then we want to go back to very slow. And I’m telling you, I wrote about one time a retrieve called the Do Nothing retrieve. I was using an unweighted fly. It was basically a mini leech of sorts of sorts with a floating fly line, and I was fishing a similar type of water that we’re talking about. I would cast out. I’m holding myself in the wind. The wind is blowing on me. And I’m just using my fins to to hold myself as best I can on the contour line that my depth finder is telling me I’m at. And then I’m basically just trying to keep the line straight. And sometimes the fly just sitting there is all you need. It’s just like sitting under a bobber. I mean, if it’s in the area that, you know, at the level that the fish are at on the contour line that the fish are at and it looks like food, they’re probably going to eat it.
00:25:48 Dave: That’s right. Okay. Perfect. So and you mentioned depth finder. Maybe. Let’s hear that on a little bit. You mentioned float tubes. Are you also fishing boats out there. And talk about your sonar depth finder. Whatever you use in there.
00:26:01 George: And some of the lakes a boat can be an advantage. And I’ll give an example of a fairly popular lake in South Central that has rainbow trout, Arctic char, burbot, and some other species too. But it’s called Big Lake and it’s in the Wasilla area. I used to ice fish it a lot as well. For Arctic char. It is a big lake and it’s got a couple public accesses, and you can go out there and catch some fish in a float tube in those areas. And I don’t feel handicapped doing that because nobody else is out there doing it. It’s the weirdest thing. But if I was serious about chasing Arctic char in that lake, and I’m saying I’m going to use a type six line and I’m going to fish water from fifteen to twenty five feet deep, you can catch them. I have done it both in my float tube and a boat. A boat would be helpful because you can simply go to more structure during the course of the day with a float tube. You’re very limited on your range.
00:26:53 Dave: Yeah that’s right. But it sounds like you do use a float tube quite a bit out there.
00:26:57 George: Almost exclusively.
00:26:58 Dave: Yeah. Maybe. Describe that. What’s your. There’s a ton of floats. In fact, we have Chris Callahan from Outkast. We’re going to be talking to him again soon. But what’s your. Are you using, like, a pontoon or what’s your style?
00:27:10 George: Yeah, it’s a good, good question. I fished in several different ones. The Outcast Prowler was one of my favorites. It’s a big float tube. It’s pretty comfy. It’s more comfortable than, say, the fish cat, for which I’ve spent lots and lots of time in. Both of those are not bad float tubes. But, you know, I’m I’ve got an addictive personality, and I might go out there and I might be on the water for ten or twelve hours if I have the time. I mean, I’m going to learn. I’m going to I’m out there to learn. And I have spent that much time out there. More commonly, it’s, you know, it’s probably my average trip, probably more like six hours now. But I can tell you this if your float tube is uncomfortable, six hours, you’re going to your butt’s gonna be sore. Your back might be hurting.
00:27:52 Dave: Yeah, that’s not good.
00:27:53 George: That’s not good. So the most comfortable float tube that I’ve used is they’ll call it a pontoon boat, but I call it a float tube. Is a supercat made by New World Manufacturing. It’s the same tube that Danny Rickards promoted for a long time.
00:28:08 Dave: Yeah, yeah. Danny Rickards. Okay. Yeah, I got you. And this is the. I’m looking at it now. Yeah. The supercat and it’s kind of a pontoon.
00:28:16 Speaker 3: Yeah. It looks, it looks, it looks like two Vienna.
00:28:19 George: Sausages.
00:28:19 Speaker 3: That are blue.
00:28:20 Dave: Yeah, it’s really unique. Yeah. This does not look like your your other outcast boats. It looks like two tubes that are kind of like sausages put together. And then you got a chair in the middle. So why is that one more comfortable than, say, some of the other ones out there.
00:28:32 George: It’s not only more comfortable, it’s more functional. The frame in between those two sausages is is basically a backpack frame. And the seat is mesh. It’s a heavy duty mesh. It’s very form fitting and comfortable and you can raise your elevation, I think. I think up to two or three inches. You can vary the elevation that you’re sitting, which is helpful when the water is cold or you’re fishing late in the season or really early in the season because less of you is in the water and you’ll be more comfortable. But that’s only part of it. Um, it’s really comfortable. That mesh seat is the most comfortable float tube seat I have ever sat in by far, but that’s only part of the story. The other part is, see those big, long, straight pontoons? Yeah, they provide a huge amount of space to add things like your sonar rod holders and all that stuff. And when I go float tube fishing out in these lakes, I usually have at least three fully rigged rods on my float tube. Wow. Sometimes four. So we talked some about, you know, lakes being dynamic and fishing during the seasons. Early in the season, I’m going to go out there with a floating line with an indicator on it. I’m going to have a hover line and I’m going to have a standard intermediate clear camo type line for sure. Early in the season, that’s what’s going to be on my tube. And I’ve got to have a means. I don’t want to change spools on the water. That’s too much downtime. I’d much rather just grab the next rod if I’m going to change the presentation.
00:30:00 Dave: Right. And on that boat, you would have your rods be broken down and you just put them together?
00:30:04 George: Nope. They’re full length.
00:30:05 Dave: Oh, they’re full length. So you got full length rods all set up? Ready to go?
00:30:08 George: That’s right. I have to send you a picture of it.
00:30:10 Dave: Yeah. You have to send a picture. Yeah. So so that’s interesting. I really I mean, I’ve heard these boats, but I wasn’t aware they had so many features and and so I guess the difference between again back to the boat. So this versus I mean, if you had a boat like a John boat or whatever out there, you would have more room and all of that. But what is the disadvantage of a boat? It’s just harder to get into some of these lakes.
00:30:29 George: Well, um, most any lakes that stocked is required to have public access, but that public access is sometimes a narrow, bumpy dirt road that goes straight to the water with very little parking, no facilities. So a little John boat is okay. They’re pretty easy to launch, but they’re noisy. I would recommend putting indoor outdoor carpeting, astroturf, something on the bottom of them for sure. I would suggest getting two anchors, uh, with good systems, to quietly deploy them, because you go to these areas once you start learning the lakes and you know where the fish are, you want to get within casting range, but then you want to slowly anchor or carefully quietly anchor your boat so that you’re in position to fish those fish. Some advantages of the boat. Or you can stand up and cast.
00:31:15 Dave: Oh, wow. You can stand up in that boat.
00:31:17 George: Well, not in this float tube I’m talking about. But if you’re in a boat, like a John boat.
00:31:21 Dave: Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s one of the advantages. Yeah. You can stand up.
00:31:23 George: Yeah, you can stand up and cast. And it’s a lot easier to cast, you know, fifty, sixty, however far you want to cast standing up than it is when you’re, you know, but deep in the water for me, you know, I can grab that float tube and carry it fifty yards to the water or twenty yards to the water or ten feet to the water, whatever I need to do very easily. The boat is just a little bit harder to do that with and in. And another thing is some of these lakes, uh, there is no actual boat launch. You have a trail that goes to the water that might be, like I said, forty yards long, fifty yards long, or it might be a third of a mile. So you’re going to have to walk in.
00:32:00 Dave: Yeah. That’s it. No, it makes sense. And I’m just looking at the website now too on uh supercat dot us and it says lite, lightweight, rugged, ready for the wild. Right. I mean that that’s the advantage. You could take this thing and I’m guessing that you could even. What if you had to pack it? Is this a packable thing? If you were really going on a longer trip?
00:32:17 George: Yes. The seatback folds down flat. It becomes essentially a backpack frame. The straps. I don’t know if you were looking at the picture, but the straps that hold the seatback upright become your backpack straps and you can actually rotate the T tubes closer together if you want, and hold them together with a strap that’s behind the seat. Um, I when I, when I usually do that, I’ll put the tube, I’ll put the backpack straps on. So I’m carrying the tube, my sonar, which is strapped on with a wide piece of web belt. I’ll basically loop over my shoulder so it’s not on the tube when I’m when I’m hiking in, my rods will be in my hand and I can, I can, you know, if I have to. There’s a place in the Matanuska Lake State rec area called Long Lake, which is a supposedly a quality fishery where you can’t use bait. You got to walk to get to that thing, and you can walk down a really steep hill or you can walk an easier but longer path to the other end of the lake. And that’s that’s how I would do it, as I would, just like I described. So that that capability is helpful.
00:33:23 Dave: Yeah. That’s awesome. Okay. I’m glad we went down this track on the boats because this is a killer boat. I mean, in the price, actually, I’m not sure what it cost with all the features, but I mean, you’re talking under a thousand bucks for the boat, which sounds like this is a killer boat.
00:33:35 George: They’re also very, very, very durable.
00:34:27 Dave: It looks like they have the same pontoon like material you would have on a raft.
00:34:31 Speaker 4: That’s correct.
00:34:32 Dave: Yeah, it’s like the actual I don’t know what it is they’re using, but it’s it’s real, real deal stuff. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. And, um, let’s go back to the time of year. So you got June. What happens after the dams into July, August. Talk about the change there.
00:34:46 George: There’s some overlap that happens in June. In the early part, you still have some chironomids popping up in decent numbers in some of the lakes. You got the damselfly thing happening. By the time you get to mid-June, the dragonflies are starting to migrate towards shore. And uh, all through the latter half of June and July, you’ve got dragonfly migration going on. Some of these lakes have the little stubby, spider like looking dragonfly nymphs. Others have the great big darner type dragonflies that you know wind up being four inches long as adults. The fish like those things and I tell you, I’ve been. I’ve caught a lot of fish in my life and I don’t break very many fish off. But when I do, it’s a lot of times it’s while I’m fishing dragonfly nymphs in the lakes because they pound those things. Sometimes it’s like they know they can get away because the dragonfly can, you know, kind of use jet propulsion to spurt forward a couple inches. The fish know that. So when they bite it, sometimes they do it with authority. Wow. I use I use three x tippets most of the times in Alaska’s lakes. Sometimes I’ll go down to four x, but I don’t think you need to. But with dragonfly dragonfly nymphs I’m usually using two x two x.
00:35:53 Dave: Okay. What’s your typical leader setup? If you’re fishing, uh, you know, dragonflies, damselflies. What are you using there? How long?
00:36:00 George: Well, with dragonflies, I’m going to use a leader that’s twelve feet long. Most likely tapered to three x on that hover line. Most likely, maybe on a regular intermediate line if I’m fishing a little bit deeper water with dragonflies early on, I’m going to fish probably a little bit deeper than I would say in mid-June. I’m probably going to fish a little deeper with dragonfly nymphs than I would in early July, but I have a preference for two styles of dragonflies and what fly line I use and what leader I use depends on which fly I’m using. A carry special type pattern is a dragonfly nymph imitation.
00:36:35 Dave: Oh yeah. Carry special go classic.
00:36:38 George: With that I’m probably going to use an intermediate line and my leader will be probably nine feet long, ten feet long, eleven feet long somewhere in there. The challenge with fishing that style is dragonflies like weeds. And you’re going to be fishing around weeds. The key, of course, is to get it down close to the tops of the weeds without catching weeds. So you’re going to have to count down and pay attention to how long you’re letting that sink in time. I went to the easy button and that is regardless of the depth that I’m fishing a dragonfly nymph, I’m going to use a sinking line. It will be a tight three or even a type six. Type six has advantages and then it gets to the bottom faster. I’m going to use, um, a trick out of Randall Kaufman’s playbook from his book Love Fishing With a fly that I think he wrote with Ron Cordes in two nineteen eighty four. Maybe.
00:37:30 Dave: What was this book on Randall Lake?
00:37:32 George: Fishing with a fly.
00:37:33 Dave: Oh, yeah, Lake fishing with a fly. Okay, perfect.
00:37:35 George: It is the first most authoritative book on the on the subject that I found. It was a great book, but he has a pattern in there that he called a floating dragonfly nymph. I use floating dragonfly nymphs and fast sinking fly lines, and when I use that setup, I’m not using a long leader. I’m using a leader that’s four or five feet long. Four or five feet is all you need, because I want that fly line to get down to the bottom. The fly line is essentially sliding over the bottom or sliding on top of the weeds, the dragonfly nymph enough as it begins to be retrieved, winds up just a little bit higher in the water column than that. It is deadly. Deadly? Deadly effective during the dragonfly migration.
00:38:14 Dave: Gotcha. So? So your fly’s kind of down in the weeds. And then are your your lines in the weeds, but your flies above the weeds. And then are you still doing a, some sort of a strip retrieve.
00:38:23 George: I’m doing the same retrieve that I described with damsels. I’m doing a hand twist slow, and every once in a while with a dragon, because they’re bigger and they’re they do move faster when they’re startled. I’ll give it two short strips, like four inch to six inch strips, strip strip, and then back to the hand twist. And, uh, like I said, they clobber that thing sometimes. I’ll add that you can also use that same setup to fish a booby, if you know what a booby fly is.
00:38:50 Dave: Yeah. The boobies. Same thing. Yeah. The boobies, the same idea. It’s a, it’s a floating fly that.
00:38:54 George: Absolutely. Yeah. If you tie that booby in natural shades like black, olive brown instead of the fluorescent colors that you see, it actually makes a decent dragonfly nymph imitation.
00:39:06 Dave: Nice. So yeah. So that’s damsel. So you’re fishing similarly or dragon similar to damsels, but you got this floating fly with a sink tip heavy sinking line. And then and that’s July. And then talk about more on the summer as the summer goes. What other patterns are you using out there?
00:39:21 Speaker 4: Okay.
00:39:22 George: All summer long, all summer. A booger is a good pattern. And, uh, many, many years ago, it was probably in the mid to late eighties, late eighties. I was going to college in Ellensburg, Washington, skipping school more than I was going to school so that I could hunt, hunt elk or, you know, fish. Uh, I started tying my boogers back then with dubbing because I thought dubbing looked a lot better in the water than chenille. Spikier a booger is always a great choice in Alaska’s lakes. If I had to pick one color, it would probably be black.
00:39:55 Dave: Black, black with just straight black. Or do you put some flash in there?
00:39:59 George: I’d put a little bit of subtle flash in there, but not real bright flash. I like the Mirage type flashes. I like the pearl flash, which tends to change colors depending on the material that it’s with.
00:40:10 Dave: Pearls. Great. And are you thinking, are you waiting those flies at all?
00:40:13 Speaker 4: I do wait, my boogers!
00:40:15 George: And uh, another one that I’ll say is a good one is Brown.
00:40:19 Dave: Oh, brown. Yeah.
00:40:20 George: Brown is greatly underrated. Very few people fish it, but I do wait it. And I usually, if I remember right, my boogers are sizes eight and ten primarily. You can make them bigger, but I don’t want to damage small fish. So I use size eights and tens and the big fish will eat them. Trust me, it doesn’t take a very, very big fly to make these big fish eat. Um, I’ll weight them with like ten wraps or maybe fifteen wraps of oh point zero one five lead, uh, or a bead. But I don’t like tungsten beads for the legs unless I’m really trying. If I was fishing Arctic char in twenty five feet of water. Yeah, maybe I’d put a tungsten bead on there, but for for the legs, I just want that thing to sink at about the same rate as the fly line. Again, I want everything to be as straight as possible. Straight is good. Rod tip should be in the water during your presentation. Not four feet in the water, six inches in the water, something like that. If your fly line is straight and your rod tips in the water like that, if that fish comes up and even breathes on it, you’re going to feel it. And with boogers, you’ll feel something every once in a while. But nothing connects. If that happens and you have a question mark in your head, you need to look at your fly because very common you’ll you’ll look at your fly and find that the tail is wrapped around the bend of the hook, which is a sure sign that a fish took your fly. But spit it out before you had a chance to do anything. When they do that, almost invariably the marabou tail will get wrapped around the bend of the hook.
00:41:40 Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:41:41 Dave: What are the the wooly buggers imitating.
00:41:43 Speaker 4: Leeches.
00:41:44 George: Primarily. But I will add this when it comes to fishing lakes or probably fishing anywhere, these trout are opportunistic. Anything that looks like food, if they’re hungry, they’re going to eat it. So a booger, it just looks alive. We want our flies and lakes to look alive. That’s why marabou is so important. And soft dubbings things that move with the slightest input from us, or the thing, or the slightest input from waves for that matter, help. And that’s why with virtually all the flies that are using lakes in the same idea of trying to be lifelike, I use a non-slip mono loop knot, and I tried it tie that loop fairly small.
00:42:24 Dave: Oh you do. So that’s a question I always have. I find that when I’m time and this is more for steelhead, but I try to make them, you know, I don’t go super small. I feel like I don’t want them too long because they might get hooked into the hook shank. But why do you like them? Really small?
00:42:37 George: Well, not really small. Pretty small. Yeah, on a small fly, like a size twelve chironomid pupa. If I can get that loop to about an eighth of an inch in three x tippet, that’s big enough to provide plenty of freedom of movement for that fly with a size eight booger, my loop might be closer to a quarter of an inch, but generally it’s going to be less than a quarter of an inch for these lake flies. Yeah.
00:43:02 Dave: Okay. Nice. So, uh, and I mean, there’s tons here, uh, you know, definitely want to keep going on this, but maybe just take us through the rest of the season. When when do you stop fishing? When’s the latest? You might be able to fish the lakes up there.
00:43:13 George: Well, I consider summer in Alaska to be when the ice is off the lakes enough for me to fish. And winter starts when the lakes begin to freeze and I no longer can put the float tube in the rest of the time of summer to me.
00:43:26 Dave: And when is that in Alaska? That’s the one challenge with Alaska, right? Because you’re up north. Yeah. The winter comes in sooner. When is that? When’s the latest you’ve been out there fishing?
00:43:34 George: Well, a lot of people have put away their fishing gear by this time of year right now. But I’m telling you, it’s still happening. And it varies from year to year depending on how soon it gets cold. But, uh, it’s it’s still happening right now.
00:43:46 Dave: It’s still so, so mid-October, which is when we’re talking now, it’s still probably in Alaska. You could probably still fish lakes this year.
00:43:52 George: You can for sure. Most years I would say you’re safe until the middle of October, but after that it gets sketchy and it’s going to be cold, and you’re going to have to bundle up. And if you have neoprene waders, you know, from October is not a bad time to have neoprene waders on.
00:44:08 Dave: Yeah. Oh, neoprene. That’s that’s a good point. So do you still use neoprene?
00:44:12 Speaker 5: I do.
00:44:12 George: But only when it’s really cold. Most often I still use breathable nowadays because they have enough room in them that I can layer up underneath them and still be comfortable, and that’s preferable to me than wearing neoprene. Neoprene is definitely effective when it’s cold out though.
00:44:28 Dave: So you can still get. Yeah, and that’s the thing. I was just in the store recently kind of superior because they’re, you know, you can use them throughout the year. Right. And you can just layer up. But but neoprene is are kind of I always love neoprene because yeah, they’re warmer or they’re warm. And then also the safety thing, they feel like they’re tighter. If you were to have to swim in neoprene, they’re kind of nice, right? Have you ever had to do that at all?
00:44:47 George: Um, not from my float tube. I think about it sometimes. And, uh, one of the things I look for in float tubes is I want at least two air bladders. So if one pops, I still have flotation to save my butt.
00:44:58 Dave: Yeah, yeah, that’s another good reason. On that boat we talked about is that it’s got those bomber tubes that you’re probably not too worried about. Those things.
00:45:06 George: Those things are tough as nails. My current one that I’m using, I think I’ve had it since twenty twelve, something like that. They last a long time. If you’re taking care of them and they don’t, they don’t require a lot of care.
00:45:20 Dave: Yeah. Nice. Well, I guess in talking about the big fish again, any other tips on that? If somebody was thinking, okay, they go to the website, they find some lakes they think are going to be good. Now they’re um, they’re on a lake where they think there might be some big fish. How are they finding them? Is it kind of still. Do you have any? Give us a few more tips or something we might think about.
00:45:38 George: Sure. First, like I mentioned before, look at all that and look for the shoal areas, particularly shoal areas close to deep water. Your big fish will go up onto the shoals to feed, but they don’t like to stay there that much because there are ospreys and things like that that want to eat them. So they’ll, they’ll feed sometimes if it’s if you have wind cover, you know a lot of people don’t like wind, but wind is your friend in these lakes. It provides cover for you and the fish seem much less picky. It’s like they can’t see as good when there’s so much refraction coming from the surface. They’re easier to fool. They bite better, and they’ll stay in shallow water longer if they have wind cover, because they seem to know they’re protected from above, birds can’t see them. So, um, look at all that. Find those shoal areas, find those drop offs that are nearby. Then once you get onto the lake, you’re going to go towards those areas, keep your eyes open and be looking for signs of fish. Granted, the big fish don’t show themselves much, but like I said, if you see one big fish roll, he’s there and there may be more of them there and they’re there for a reason. You want to fish that area slowly and methodically. If you want to catch big fish, be slow and methodical and be resigned to the fact that you’re not going to catch twenty of them in a day. I have, but that is like the very, very much an unusual situation. It’s, uh, you’re fishing for a few big ones.
00:48:04 Dave: Yeah, cool. So slow, methodical and uh, and just cover the water. This is good. And the point on the deep. Yeah. Finding those deep drop offs which you can find on probably a Google map.
00:48:15 George: That’s right.
00:48:16 Dave: Sometimes. And then with the shoal area.
00:48:18 George: Yep. And then if you’re out there, you’re fishing from a float tube. And I know not everybody has a small sonar that they can take. But if you’re serious about the Stillwater fly fishing game, you have to have a sonar on your float tube, period.
00:48:30 Dave: You do. Now describe that because I know this sonar versus save fish finder, all these other things. Now is this because you have some that are higher tech? Is that is this a fish? What is this exactly?
00:48:40 Speaker 5: It’s a fish.
00:48:40 George: Finder. Chartplotter. Yeah. You know the things that we use on our boats? Only small. You want the smallest one you can get. And I tell you, my favorite ones were the simplest ones. There were black and white. There weren’t a lot of bells and whistles. There weren’t a map feature. I don’t need the map feature. I don’t need to drop waypoints.
00:48:58 Dave: Yeah. So you’re not looking at. You’re not these things aren’t you’re not seeing like the fish on the actual thing.
00:49:04 George: You can it depends on how deep the water you’re in. You’re not going to see fish if you’re sitting in five feet of water. They’re simply the cone angle is too low and they’re not going to swim underneath you. But if you’re in, say, thirteen feet of water or more, the deeper it gets, the more likely you are to see some fish. Okay, but I’m not really concerned about that. What I’m concerned with is when you’re out there on the water, the wind’s blowing a little bit. You look off to the side, down into the water. And what do you see? You see black. You can’t tell where you are. And if you’re one hundred yards offshore, I mean, some of these shoals and things that I’m fishing, there is no tree right there on the bank that you can use for a reference point. You’re way the hell out there in the middle. You have to have some means to know what depth you’re sitting in, and you need to try to stay there. You’re fishing contour lines. So with the depth finder what I need is I need to see temperature. I always want to keep track of temperature. I need to see water depth, and I need to have a reasonably good picture so that I can see what’s on the bottom, meaning weeds or rocks or that sort of thing. That’s all I really need. I wish they would make a simple black and white sonar that just gave you those things. And if it can see the weeds and determine, you know, distinguish bottom types, it’ll be able to see fish too. But that’s not my real concern. I want that depth so that I know that I’m still on the nine foot contour or whatever it is I’m trying to do. That’s because looking into the water, you just can’t tell. It just looks black unless it’s dead calm and there’s no wind, you’re just not going to be able to tell where you are.
00:50:31 Dave: Yeah, because you’re not out there necessarily fishing the deepest of the deep water unless you’re going for, um, lake trout or something like that. Right. Is there a max like what would be the deepest water you fish for? And we’re talking rainbows mostly, right?
00:50:43 Speaker 5: I’ll tell you a story.
00:50:44 George: One time I remember I went out to the valley. It was in the middle of summer, probably late July. It was hot for Alaska. By hot for Alaska, I mean eighty degrees. I stopped in this tavern on the way out there. This was back in the days when I still drink, and I had a few beers and I was thinking, do I really want to go out there because I was going to fish that long lake, um, that I told you you gotta hike into? Well, I did, I went out there and I started to fish and I fished the shoulders and it was deadsville. Man, there was no wind. It was hotter than crap. And out of desperation, I started trolling and I was trolling from one side of the lake where the trail comes down to the other side and you’re going over a stretch of water that’s like fifty five feet deep there. And I saw a fish suspended like twenty five or thirty feet down and a light bulb went on and it said, ha, those fish are out here suspended at that depth because it’s too bright and warm in the shallows. So they’re just loafing around out here. Well, I took the time to actually change reel spools and I put on a teeny, teeny three hundred line which, if you know, sings pretty dang fast. And I put on a pretty good sized wooly booger, and I cast it about as far as I could cast it, which was, you know, I don’t know, but that set up probably sixty feet, and I let it sink until it was almost straight up and down, and I kicked my fins about three or four times. Fish on. And I repeated that for the next hour. Uh, it was amazing. It was very deep. But that’s not something I normally look to do. That was just something I stumbled upon. Usually I’m fishing water that’s twenty feet or less.
00:52:18 Dave: Yeah, twenty feet or less.
00:52:19 George: Sometimes a little deeper than that, you know. But there’s some times when I’m fishing a vertical presentation that’s with a fast sinking line. Short leader, you know, four feet. I’m basically anchored in, say, twenty feet of water. I’m going to put a heavy weight on the fly, and I’m going to drop it down to the bottom with my rod in fishing position. I’m going to wind in any slack line that I have. Then I’m going to strip all that line back in and take one real turn so that my fly doesn’t go all the way to the bottom. I’m going to cast out. I’m going to let it sink till it’s straight up and down, and then I’m going to retrieve it at about one inch pulse, stopping every once in a while to let it sit. And, uh, I, you got to have deep water for that to work. If you try to do that in seven feet of water, no fish is going to swim under you. But at twenty feet, they will. And it can be remarkably fun. I mean, when you’re fishing that particular presentation, a lot of times it feels like they’re trying to take your rod from you when they bite.
00:53:11 Dave: Right. And what fly would you be using on that snow cone?
00:53:14 George: Chironomid pupa. And what do they bite so hard like that? I don’t think they’re biting hard. I think what’s happening is they’re seeing the fly above them. They swim up to grab it and turn immediately to go back down to the level they were at. So you get a big pull on the fly rod, okay.
00:53:28 Dave: That’s your deep. That’s kind of a deep, uh chironomid technique.
00:53:31 George: That’s correct.
00:53:31 Dave: Without an indicator, no indicator.
00:53:33 George: Fast sinking fly line. You’re basically fishing by. Feel straight up and down.
00:53:37 Dave: Right. Okay, nice. Well, let’s, um, let’s kind of start to take it out of here with our, this is our conservation corner segment. We’re going to talk. I want to hear kind of some of the stuff going on. I know I think you guys talk about some of that in the magazine. But today this is presented by Patagonia, Patagonia, Swift Current waders. We’re big fans of Patagonia. They’re awesome on the conservation end I’ve been wearing their waders a ton. Um, you know, again we talked about neoprene. Well, these are the ones I’ve been wearing are kind of the, the the with the zip, you know, they’re Gore-Tex kind of all the good stuff. So first shout out to Patagonia. Now let’s take it back into a little bit as we take it out of here on the magazine. Are you guys do you have a conservation piece in that and maybe talk about an issue or two or something that you guys have been working on?
00:54:20 George: We do. Um, there’s actually a column called conservation and it’s sponsored by Trout Unlimited. So in every issue they sent us a new topic. Basically, a lot of times it’s about stream restoration. Um, some of the ones that are on, you know, in my memory are ones related to reclamation from mining, damage from, you know, a hundred years ago. Um, Trout Unlimited is doing a lot of good work in Alaska. I’m a big fan of what they do. You know, we have our own little conservation piece going, and it’s I don’t know if I’d really call it a conservation piece, but in general, the trawl industry, we feel, is creating big problems for a number of species in the North Pacific, including Chinook salmon and chum salmon, plus doing habitat damage and, uh, minimizing forage food base with atrocious and we think unsustainable amounts of bycatch.
00:55:11 Dave: Yeah. These are the giant nets right there just kind of taking in everything.
00:55:14 George: Yeah. They basically scoop up everything that’s down there and they drag them on the bottom. So they tear up the bottom too, which creates new problems and releases much carbon dioxide gas. We’ve started something new. It’s basically an evolution of our recipe page and we call it call it Troll Feet Free Table. So we’re talking about, uh, using fish that weren’t caught in trawls for our recipes nowadays.
00:55:38 Dave: Gotcha. Yeah. So there’s. So now describe that again. What is the troll free. What is that segment or the piece you guys.
00:55:44 George: Troll free tables. Basically. Uh, an evolution of our recipe column. We used to have a recipe column and we had a sponsor for that. But a lot of the recipes that we were getting were based on fish that were caught via troll, and we didn’t like that. So now we’re doing trophy table. It’s basically still a recipe column, but it’s focused on using fish that are caught with more sustainable means rather than troll caught fish.
00:56:11 Dave: And what would be a sustainable, more sustainable than troll caught.
00:56:15 George: That would imagine. That would depend on who you ask for me. First and foremost, a sport caught fish is by far the most sustainable of all. As long as that particular run of fish or stock of fish can, can handle the harvest. Um, there are some others. I mean, the more terminal a fishery happens to be Prosecuted the the less mixed stocks are involved, the better I like it. That’s kind of what we’re talking about. And if we you know, there are lots of different ways of commercial fishing. The gillnetting I’m not a big gillnet fan, even when they are used in terminal areas because they catch everything a gill, a gill net has no conscience, I like to say. So you may be targeting those bazillions of sockeyes, but you’re going to catch those few chum salmon. You’re going to catch some king salmon that might be headed to the same river or even other rivers. And that’s no good in my in my mind, I would much rather see fish traps come back. In Alaska, they were banned because people were putting fish traps across streams and basically harvesting everything but a fish trap. Used properly, you can harvest one hundred percent of what’s been allocated on paper, yet release one hundred percent of the non-target species to continue upstream to spawn.
00:57:32 Dave: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I’m looking I’m I looked at, uh, our website. We have a few articles or a few podcasts we’ve done with on the bycatch on the trawlers. Um, in the last year, uh, we had, uh, salmon stayed on. We had Adam from Fishtown talked about, uh, the trawlers, the problems there. And then, uh, we also had one with Rick Williams, who talked more, I think more lower forty eight he has a book out there, Managed Extinction. Um, so but you guys have I’m looking at your page too, so you can actually get on this trawl fishing. You got a article on it here. So some of the talk about that on your website. Can people read some of this online even if they’re not subscribed.
00:58:09 George: They can. And I would expect that as time goes on. And this, um, concept of troll free table and our support of banning trolling continues, there will be more available to view.
00:58:22 Dave: Okay. Yeah. Because I’m reading something cool. You have an actual table here, Chinook trawl fishing bycatch and you’ve got the NOAA fisheries table. So I think this is important. We’ll put a link out to this one. Um, this article trawl fishing wanton waste on the high seas is that one that was done by two or three, I guess. Josh Leach.
00:58:40 George: Josh Leach, one of our writers. He’s also a charter captain out of Kodiak.
00:58:44 Dave: Oh, cool. Talk about that a little bit, because I know on the last episode we talked about your background, how you got into the amazing. I think you started with your you weren’t this wasn’t your career field. Then you found yourself, you know, in it. Talk about fish. Alaska magazine. How does it work? How many editors? How many writers? What do you guys have going?
00:59:01 George: Oh, gosh, that’s a good question. Um, a brother and sister started the magazine back in two thousand, two thousand and one. Um, their names are Markus Wiener and Melissa Norris. They are the publishers as well. There is one editor. That’s me. We have what we call contributing editors. If you look on the masthead of the magazine, but they’re mostly just people who write for us and have contributed for a long time. They don’t actually do any editing. We have six staff members besides me that do a variety of things, from layout and graphics to administrative tasks and our website and our social media presence, those sorts of things.
00:59:42 Dave: Yeah. And you guys have a lot going. How many how many articles are you or magazines are you publishing? Because this is actually a physical magazine still too, right?
00:59:49 George: It is both. It’s both a print and a and a physical. And we found that our subscribers tend to like the print version. They like to have it in their hands. Um, ten issues per year. We we combine the months of August and September into an issue in October and November into an issue. And what that does, there’s a couple reasons for it. Uh, the main reason is it allows us to get into the field so that we can generate more content during the, you know, the latter half of summer and fall because we like to.
01:00:17 Dave: Yeah. That’s right. You’re. This is the time. Yeah. September. October. I mean, this is hunting fishing time and and it is fish Alaska. But is there a also a fish or a hunt? Alaska.
01:00:27 George: There sure is. We started Hunt Alaska in two thousand and eight. And, uh, you know, it hasn’t been around a lot, but I think it’s a high quality magazine. And you had asked about writers. You know, I kind of manage our writers list. And every year I put out a call for queries, for new articles for each magazine, and I’m sending that to approximately. I haven’t looked at my spreadsheet lately, but sixty, sixty different writers that are from all over the world, not just Alaska.
01:00:55 Dave: Yeah. So and hunting seems to be I mean, there’s a lot more hunters, right, than fly or fishermen. Is that the case, or is fishing? If you look at all fishing, conventional everything, is it kind of equal to hunting or is hunting just way bigger?
01:01:07 George: No, there’s more anglers than there are hunters visiting Alaska. I’m convinced of that. And in roughly two thirds of Alaska, fishing license sales are actually nonresidents.
01:01:19 Dave: Right. Two thirds.
01:01:20 George: Yeah. The hunting population is smaller, but the hunters are much more willing to invest money into into their activity, you know, and if you think about it, it kind of makes sense if you’re I hate to say it, but if you’re a non-resident and you want to hunt a brown bear, you better have about twenty five thousand dollars because you’re going to have to go with a guide. And that’s what they’re going to. That’s what they’re going to charge you.
01:01:43 Dave: Wow. A guide is twenty five K.
01:01:45 George: For brown bears I would say that’s probably average. Some are probably more. You might be able to find one for less. Prices have definitely gone up in the last few years. So fishing can be done much more affordably. And that’s why I believe that there’s quite a few more fishermen than there are hunters visiting Alaska.
01:02:01 Dave: That makes the Alaska lodges look like a steal of a deal when you compare that. Geez.
01:02:05 George: Yeah, the lodge prices have gone up quite a bit in the last few years too.
01:02:10 Dave: Yeah, everything. Everything’s gone up, you know what I mean? It’s like the pickup trucks. I mean, you name it, everything’s more expensive.
01:02:16 George: Yeah.
01:02:17 Dave: But. Okay, cool. Well, this is this has been great, I think. And I’ll highlight one more. Marcus. Uh, we had him on top seven Alaska fish species. So we kind of went through his top seven. I can’t remember what he had as the top. I’ll have to relisten to that one. But Marcus was on who was. That was a great episode as well.
01:02:33 George: Can I add one more thing about somebody who might be interested in doing a do it yourself trip for Stillwater in Alaska? Yeah, the easy button. Fly into Anchorage, get a rental car or rental SUV, bring your float tube with you, or buy one at Three Rivers. Fly and tackle Mossy Fly shop, Sportsman’s Warehouse. Buy one. You can sell it later. If you want to go up to Wasilla and stay at a place called trout House. It’s also sometimes referred to as the Windbreak Cafe. It is a bar, a restaurant, and a hotel. It’s very affordable by Alaska standards, and it’s at ground zero for the Mat-su Valley Stillwater game, which I kind of refer to that area as Kamloops of the North. Go there. The owner of that place I fished with many times is avid fly fisherman. There’s pictures all over the walls of of him and his friends with big fish they’ve caught both in the lakes legs and in the rivers. Stuffed fish on the walls. Good prices. Good food. And from that location, you’re within forty five minutes. Of all those eighty five lakes that I talked about, it is a great way to go.
01:03:38 Dave: Wow. Perfect. No, that’s. That is easy. But that’s perfect. So we got so somebody could listening now could put together this trip literally, you know, get a ticket to Alaska, get your car, get that float tube and then you have stay I mean and that probably I’m guessing is quite a bit less than maybe a lodge up there. Right. Some of these.
01:03:54 George: Way less, way, way less. It’s very affordable. And I can tell you I could set you up. I could give you instructions on how you could go catch rainbow trout, Arctic char and Arctic grayling all in the same day.
01:04:05 Dave: In lakes.
01:04:06 George: In.
01:04:06 Dave: Lakes. So in what we talked about, we kind of did a high level. But if people want to take this further, what would you recommend? What would be a good next step if they really want to dig into anything we talked about today?
01:04:16 George: Well, I visited that all that lakes database. They’re welcome to call me and ask questions or email me and ask questions. I’ll answer them. I tend my favorite lakes. I tend not to say the names of, but I can. I can get you close.
01:04:30 Dave: Sure. Yeah. You don’t have to spot burn. Yeah. And what’s a good email for you.
01:04:33 George: George at Fish Alaska Magazine.com.
01:04:37 Dave: Okay. All right. George. Well, uh, I just got a couple of random ones, and I’ll let you get out of here. Um, you know, gear, lights, gear. And you mentioned, uh, hunting. So are you hunting? Are you still doing as much hunting as fishing? What’s that look like for you?
01:04:49 George: I still hunt, I’m really avid. Uh, I’ve shot in three NRL hunter matches in the past year and a half or so. Uh, I did travel to Sitka, Alaska this year to do a conventional gear fishing trip with my kids. My daughter left after the fishing, and me and the boys went up in the alpine, and I shot a blacktail deer up there.
01:05:07 Dave: Oh, wow. And what’s the NRL.
01:05:09 George: National Rifle League?
01:05:10 Dave: Oh, League. Okay. Yeah. So this is like a, um, like sharpshooting or hunting.
01:05:14 George: It’s a competitive hunting game, I guess you could say. Or a match where you have to first find the targets and then engage them from a variety of different shooting positions in natural terrain. So it mimics the kind of situation you’re going to have in hunting, and your time on a stage is timed. You only have a certain amount of time to find the targets and then go engage them. Wow. It’s challenging.
01:05:39 Dave: Are the targets like a big game or what are the targets?
01:05:43 George: There are silhouette steel targets. They’re usually not real big. They’re not real small either. It’s hard to find them, and the targets range in distance from about two hundred yards out to over nine hundred yards nine hundred yards.
01:05:56 Dave: Wow.
01:05:57 George: So it is challenging.
01:05:58 Dave: And I’m not a master hunter or anything. You know, I’ve still, um, you know, but I love I love hunting. What’s a what’s your rifle like. Do you have a specialized rifle. What are you shooting for that?
01:06:08 George: Well, I started building rifles in the last few years to try to get exactly what I want. And for NRL hunter and deer sized game, I like the six point five PRC cartridge.
01:06:19 Dave: Now describe that for the like. What is that compared to say if you had a thirty six or something else.
01:06:25 George: It’s very similar in performance to a two seventy Winchester out to five hundred yards after five hundred. After five hundred yards, it outperforms a two seventy and the thirty oh six oh it does.
01:06:37 Dave: So it’s a and I always think of the two seventy as a a great kind of deer straight shooting uh right.
01:06:43 George: Rifle it is.
01:06:44 Dave: Yeah. And but but you lose the power out. So with a seven like a how would a seven millimeter mag compare to say, a two seventy or what you’re talking about.
01:06:52 George: seven millimeter Remington Magnum has, uh, quite a bit more power than a two seventy shoots flatter for father. And there are a lot of really good high ballistic coefficient bullets available in the seven millimeter cartridge. The two seventy bleeds off energy very quickly after about five hundred yards, mostly because of its barrel is designed with a relatively slow twist rate, and there aren’t very many high BC bullets. Or traditionally there weren’t. They’re starting to be some now, but it’s just not set up well for long range.
01:07:20 Dave: If you were shooting at something that’s rarely do you go over three hundred yards. Probably the two seventy would be maybe better than a seven.
01:07:27 George: If you’re shooting deer sized game. Yeah, I think most people would be able to shoot the two seventy better because it has far less recoil than the seven millimetres Remington Magnum.
01:07:35 Dave: Yeah, but the seven is cool because you could use it for elk and even bigger game.
01:07:39 George: That’s right. And you can use the two seventy for elk too. You just have to be a little bit more careful with your your shot selection and your bullet selection. You’ll want a broadside shot, and you’ll want a bullet that stays together and penetrates well.
01:07:52 Dave: Oh right, right, right. And you’re building rifles. Now that seems like a whole nother level. Like what is that? What does that mean? Building.
01:07:59 George: Let’s just say assembling. I’m buying. I’m buying a high quality components and I’m putting it together myself. And nowadays we have a plethora of custom actions. You know, the receiver and the bolt that are available on the market. You have a custom of match quality barrels, barrels, you know, that are designed for shooting in competitive shooting arenas that you can make to these actions to give you a hunting rifle. That’s very accurate. Then you have things like carbon fiber stocks or chassis that are very light or not so light, depending on what you want to do. Like I’m my next rifle build is going to be a three hundred PRC. It’s kind of like a modern day three hundred win mag. That thing’s got some recoil, so I don’t want that rifle to be very light. I want it to have some weight to it so I don’t get beat up. Too bad.
01:08:49 Dave: That’s right.
01:08:50 George: But but you can do that when you’re putting it together. You can decide on all these components to get exactly what you want.
01:08:57 Dave: Yeah. That’s cool. I think hunting is I don’t know, I think of getting into, you know, fly fishing. You hear a lot of people like newbie, you think about new people. They’re challenged with the casting. They see. It seems like it’s too hard hunting. It seems challenging to, you know, because it’s like, what do you think is the harder one for a new person who’s never done either to get into fly fishing or to get into like big game hunting or any hunting?
01:09:17 George: That’s it. that is a tough question to draw from. I mean.
01:09:21 Dave: Yeah, they’re both hard, but I feel like fly fishing because, well, it is a tough one, right? I feel like fly fishing would be my answer, but I don’t know if that’s true.
01:09:28 George: I kind of think so too. There’s a lot of nuance, nuance involved. And if you’re a guy, let’s say that you live in the South or the Midwest and you’re going to hunt whitetail deer, well, you get a rifle that can shoot for two hundred yards, which most people can shoot to two hundred yards pretty well. You’re going to be sitting in a bind a lot of times, and it’s not that complicated. But you you want to go to let’s say you want to fly fishing, you’re going to go to Alaska and you’re going to fish some streams on the Kenai Peninsula. But you also want to fish some lakes. There is a whole lot of stuff that goes into those that are quite different from each other.
01:10:01 Dave: That’s true. Although you could start, like we say, you know, if you’re in the Midwest, you could find a little lake, little pond and go for some bluegill or, right, some sunfish. And you could start easy like that.
01:10:12 George: And it’s some of my more enjoyable times. A long time ago, I was in the Air Force and I was stationed in Oklahoma. And I fly fish with little, little tiny poppers and some of these reservoirs. And I would catch largemouth bass and bluegills and whatever other kind of bream like fish there were. There was a lot of fun.
01:10:29 Dave: That is awesome. Cool. All right, George, well, we’ll send everybody out to fish Alaska Magazine.com if they have questions for you. Also get a link in the show notes that last episode we did. And yeah, I just want to thank you for all this time. Again, another great episode and hopefully we’ll get you back on and dig into more Alaska. Thanks. Thanks again. Yep. Sounds great. All right. Perfect. All right. You can find George we mentioned at Fish Alaska Magazine.com. You can go there right now. Check in with him. Uh, check in and let him know you heard this podcast and, uh, and also follow them on social media if you’re interested in putting together a trip for Stillwater. Check in with me. Dave at Wet Swing. Would love to get you into Wet Fly Swing Pro as well. You can go to Wet Fly Swing. This is our inner circle of people that listen, that want to take it the next step further connect, build relationships, and go on trips around the country. All right. On that note, we do have a big shoutout right now. If you’re interested in this trip, we should have a spot or two available still. Uh, send me an email. I mentioned it before and I will get back to you on availability. That’s the best way to get started and and find out more. All right. That’s all I got for you. I hope you have a great afternoon. If it’s evening. Hope you’re enjoying that evening. And if it’s morning. Hope you have a great day. We’ll see you and talk to you on the next episode.
01:11:57 Speaker 6: Thanks for listening to the Wet Fly swing Fly fishing show. For notes and links from this episode, visit Wet Fly com.
Conclusion with George Krumm on Stillwater Fly Fishing in Alaska
In this episode, George Krumm shares his decades of experience uncovering the overlooked magic of Stillwater Fly Fishing in Alaska. Through patient observation, careful depth control, and a deep understanding of lake ecology, he shows that Alaska’s stillwaters can rival its most famous rivers for both challenge and reward.
Krumm’s insights reveal that success comes from slowing down, matching nature’s rhythm, and learning how each lake’s unique ecosystem shapes trout behavior. His advice encourages anglers to treat stillwater fishing not as a backup plan — but as an adventure of discovery and connection to Alaska’s wild landscapes.
Have you tried stillwater fly fishing in Alaska yet, or are you planning to test it on the fly this season?
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