I guess I'm still stuck on "lot's of big fish", so each September I make the journey to Southwest Alaska to fish the Kvichak River (pronounced kwee-jack) which drains Lake Iliamna. In my opinion--one I share with many well-traveled anglers--the Kvichak is home to the toughest, strongest rainbow trout on the planet.

The Trout
These are not your average rainbow trout; they are silver-gilded river-rockets capable of performing 6-foot aerial leaps, ending in a triple somersault. When you consider that these trout can exceed 30 inches and 20 pounds, and are still capable of such aerobatics, you realize how incredible these fish are. Because of their massive size and strength, these fish are often mistaken for steelhead or anadromous trout (a trout born in fresh water that retreats to the sea for most of its adult life and returns to fresh water to spawn). While Kvichak trout have access to the ocean and may be diadromous (a trout that freely ranges between fresh and salt water), they probably don't enter Bristol Bay, and if they do, they don't stay long. The reason is, they have everything that they need where they live, in Lake Iliamna and the Kvichak River.

The Lake
In many ways Lake Iliamna is more like an inland sea than a lake. It is massive: 75 miles long and 20 miles wide, with a surface area of more than 1,000 square miles and a depth of more than 2,000 feet in spots. The natives talk of an aquatic monster in the lake that eats skiffs, (especially ones with red bottoms) and people. Although there is no scientific evidence authenticating the legend of the "Iliamna Monster", the locals take this legend quite seriously and you'll see no natives driving skiffs on the lake with any hint of a red hull. Lake Iliamna is also home to this continent's sole population of freshwater seals. This phenomenon only occurs in one other lake in the world, Lake Baikal in Russia.

Lake Iliamna has relatively few feeder streams, but the few it does have are are world famous trout fisheries. The Iliamna River, the Newhalen River, the Copper River, Gibraltar River, and Talarik Creek are all famous for their large rainbow trout.

The River
The Kvichak River drains Lake Iliamna and flows 50 miles into the Bering Sea. It runs clear (unless there is a strong east wind that stirs up the west end of the lake) for most of the summer and fall. In the winter, the river becomes a frozen "highway" connecting native villages along the river. As it exits Lake Iliamna, the 100-yard-wide Kvichak flows past the native Village of Igiugig. In years past, native villagers netted the giant Kvichak Rainbows to use as food for their sled dogs. Today the trout are protected by catch-and-release regulations.

A couple of miles downriver from the village, the river changes character and braids out into a maze of streams, streamlets, sloughs and back channels. The "Braids" cover approximately five miles as the float plane flies and are a couple miles wide in spots. It is a vast plain of treeless flat islands covered with waving grass separated by streams and sloughs. I cannot even begin to guess how many river miles of water this area encompasses, but I can tell you that I have spent hundreds of hours exploring and fishing the Braids by jet boat and have not even begun to see it all.

Below the Braids, the Kvichak continues its journey to the sea. Hardly anyone fishes this section of river, although there are large resident trout that are scattered throughout the lower river. The lower river is better known as being the single largest salmon highway on earth.

The Salmon
The Kvichak is one of the major watersheds draining into salmon-laden Bristol Bay. Although the Kvichak gets runs of all five salmon species (king, chum, silver, pink, and red), it's the red or sockeye salmon that makes this river so special. There is an average of 4 million (some years have seen in excess of 10 million) red salmon that enter the Kvichak river each year. Many of these fish continue into and beyond Lake Iliamna, but countless salmon zero in on the prime spawning grounds found in the solid gravel bottom of the "Braids" of the Kvichak.

The salmon are important because they influence the trout. Over countless millennia, the giant trout of Iliamna have adapted to the life and death cycle of the Salmon. In late summer the trout position themselves downstream of spawning salmon and eat the drifting egg. In the fall, the trout feed on the flesh of thousands of dead and decomposing salmon. In the spring, the rainbows wait in ambush as millions of three-inch smolting salmon try to migrate through the narrow river channels and out to the sea.

Even some of the physical characteristics of Kvichak trout reflect how they've adapted to hunt salmon fry. If you have ever tried to remove a fly from one of these beasts and made the mistake of sticking your finger or your hand into their mouth, you'll came away bloody, but smarter, for your effort. These trout have some serious teeth. If the trout of the Kvichak sound like they are ferocious predators; they are, and that is what makes them such special fish.

The Seasons
In some years, winter doesn't release its icy grip on the Iliamna region until late May or early June. Nearly 24 hours of daily sunlight begins the rapid thaw or "ice out" as the locals call it. Spring develops into full bloom in just a few days. The sky is filled with migratory ducks, geese and swans headed for the fertile nesting grounds of the Alaskan tundra. Alaska has more than 3 million lakes so there is no shortage of waterfowl nesting opportunities.

Rainbow trout season opens on June 8. The season is closed in the spring in an effort to protect the spawning trout from angling pressure. The trout are hungry after the long winter. They are lean and know by instinct that the food that they consume in the next four months of summer will carry them through the next frozen winter. Kvichak rainbows will often add 30 to 40 percent their body weight before summer's end.

Opening day is generally prime time to find the rainbow trout stacked up waiting in ambush for migrating salmon smolts. In a few areas of the river, the trout rip through the schooling smolts creating feeding frenzies usually associated with predatory ocean fish.

The escaping smolt will often take to the air in an effort to escape the rampaging trout. This attracts the birds that hover over the melee in an effort to capture a smolt meal. The astute angler uses his eyes, ears, and nose to locate feeding fish. The visual queue is to look for splashing water or flocking-feeding birds. The thrashing of the feeding fish can often be heard over long distances and just like on the ocean, the smell of fish in the air signals a feeding frenzy in progress. If you are lucky enough to encounter this situation, virtually any minnow or smolt pattern cast into a boil will evoke a strike.
The trout are hungry after the long winter. They are lean and know by instinct that the food that they consume in the next four months of summer will carry them through the next frozen winter. Kvichak rainbows will often add 30 to 40% to their body weight before summer's end.

If the trout are not feeding en masse, it will be necessary to "search cast" streamers to likely holding areas or cover lots of water searching for trout. The flies of choice for this are smolt patterns, Woolly Buggers or heavily weighted leeches. Jeff English, who guided this stretch of water for several years, prefers heavy black or purple bunny leeches with dumbell eyes. You'll need a 7- or 8-weight fly rod because search casting requires lots of long casts to cover the maximum amount of water.

The best fly lines are 300 grain (type IV or V) sinking-tip or full-sinking lines or shooting heads. Your leader should be short (3 feet maximum) so the fly doesn't ride up in the water column, and end in 1X or 2X tippet. The trout are not very leader-shy in the early season and you need the heavier tippet to absorb the shock of the vicious grab that typically occurs mid-strip or on the swing.

I advise keeping a tight grip on the fly rod because these fish hit so hard that they can (and have) ripped rods right out of the hands of anglers who were unprepared for the sudden strike. The retrieve should be a short, brisk inconsistent strip that imitates a wounded smolt. A good tip anytime you are fishing streamers is to keep your rod tip close to the water. If you hold your rod tip very high above the water, the weight of the fly line between your rod tip and the water inhibits the fly from coming to a complete stop. Any died-in-the-wool streamer fisherman will stress the importance of stopping the fly for fishing success.

Kvichak anglers will often anchor a boat above a likely holding area and cast downstream and slowly swim the streamer back upstream. Another technique is to drift and cast into the bank. This is one of my favorites because it allows me to cover the most water and provides constantly changing scenery.

The smolt run begins tapering off early in July. At about the same time, the adult salmon are starting to appear in the river, which will change things for the next month and a half. The salmon are full of vigor and are staking out territory. The river is in turmoil and July and the first couple weeks of August are not considered prime trout fishing periods on the Kvichak. During this time, there are a few million salmon in the river that will eagerly burn up and smoke a fly reel. The trout-focused angler should, however, plan to return in the middle of August for the egg-eating rainbows of the Kvichak.

Eggs and Trout

On the Kvichak, "matching the hatch" means using flies that imitate salmon smolts (June/July), salmon eggs (August/September), or rotting salmon flesh (October), and presenting your pattern in a realistic manner. The best time to sight-fish for enormous rainbows is when the fish are keyed on sockeye salmon eggs (above).

It is a miracle of nature that salmon live to return to the same stream and as some claim, to the exact gravel from which they emerged. Consider the odds of an egg hatching in the first place. Then surviving as a salmon fry, escaping predators to grow into a smolt, then traveling through and across thousands of miles of ocean where seemingly everything wants to eat you.

Salmon eat and grow large in the fertile ocean environment for 2 to 5 years. When nature calls, they gather in the bays fed by their natal streams. Here the running of the gauntlet begins. Commercial fishermen string gill nets across the migratory paths to intercept the salmon for commercial harvest. Beluga and killer whales pack into the river mouths feeding on hundreds of pounds of salmon a day. The seals are also there taking part in the salmon feast. If a salmon gets past this point, he's in relatively good shape. There are only brown bears, bald eagles and sport fishermen waiting for them upriver.

Where the salmon find the spawning gravel they are looking for, they select their mates and begin digging redds (large depressions in the gravel). Female salmon lay thousands of eggs, which are heavier than water and settle to the bottom. When there are thousands of spawning salmon laying thousands of eggs, millions upon millions of salmon eggs become available to the trout. Salmon eggs are extremely nutritious, abundant, and inanimate, so the trout need expend little energy to feed upon this vast food source. I have seen areas of stream bottom where eggs have collected, covering the bottom in as layer of eggs one to two feet deep. It's little wonder the trout get so large, and feed so selectively on eggs.

The Game
One of the reasons I love the Kvichak is the clarity of the water. Nothing builds anticipation more than seeing your quarry before you cast, and the transparent water on the Kvichak affords ample opportunity to hone your sight-fishing skills. If you have a good pair of polarized glasses and are patient and stealthy, you can witness the spawning rituals of the salmon, and the feeding behavior of the trout.

The best way to locate trout is to walk the back or main channels where there is heavy salmon spawning activity. Keep in mind that the more elevated you are on the bank, the better your perspective, and the better you can spot fish. Use this advantage whenever you can. Always move from downstream to upstream in an effort to remain behind the visual "window" of the trout. Also take into consideration the angle of the sun. The best visibility is always found with the sun slightly behind and above you. Be aware of the location of your shadow and the shadow of your rod and fly line. The name of the game is to see the trout before he sees you. If you spook the salmon, they, in turn, will spook the trout. Stealth is critical to your success. Look for the shadow or the fish in motion that is generally larger than the salmon; that will be the trout. He's moving around, picking up the eggs that are rolling along the bottom of the river with the current.

The majority of salmon spawning in the Braids of the Kvichak are sockeye (red) salmon. Additionally there are chum (dog), pink (humpy), king (chinook) and a few silver (coho) salmon that spawn in this reach of river. For reasons that I cannot explain, the trout appear to prefer the eggs of sockeyes above other salmon. Next in line would be the eggs of chums. Rarely do trout concentrate below spawning pink salmon.

Egg Flies
Many anglers disdain the egg fly or glo-bug. In my opinion they are missing the opportunity to practice true streamcraft or matching the hatch. All salmon eggs are not created equal; they are different sizes and colors. Sockeye eggs, when first laid, are a translucent orange. Then, as they are fertilized, exposed to water or decompose, they start changing again, often, to a whitish pink color, with or without an orange swirl.

Sockeye salmon eggs are smaller than chum salmon eggs. I have always tied my glo-bugs in an effort to try to match the size and color of the egg (salmon species) that I am trying to match or imitate. I do this by mixing different colors of Glo-Bug yarn into the strands that I use to tie the glo-bug. I also believe that hook size is critical. I try to use the smallest hook possible and I imbed the hook completely into the fly. In other words; I want as little of the hook showing as possible. Fish will refuse glo-bugs with large obvious hooks.

In recent years a new fly, the "bead", has arrived on the Alaskan fly-fishing scene. I can tell you that a plastic bead can be a near-perfect replication of a salmon egg, and that it is incredibly effective on trout. There are some who argue that the bead, being manufactured of plastic, is not a fly. This is one argument that I'm going to sit out of and stay on the sidelines. Beads come in a multitude of colors, patinas, and sheens, and some anglers prefer to paint their own custom colors with nail polish. The sizes are near perfect matches for the various salmon species. If nothing else, beads make great patterns from which to tie glo-bugs.

The Rig and Technique
On the Kvichak I use a 9-foot or a 9-1/2-foot, 7-weight rod with a high quality fly reel capable of holding a minimum of 200 to 300 yards of backing. I use the new gel spun (spider-wire) backing material because as a fish runs deep into the backing, it creates less line friction with the water, which translates into less pressure on the tippet. Use a quality floating fly line that is not a bright flourescent color. Bright colored fly lines catch fishermen not fish; in clear streams, brightly colored fly lines spook fish. Choose a fly line color that blends with the environment that you are fishing.

After years of experimenting with strike indicators of various materials, I have settled on using strands of poly yarn that I attach to my tapered leader with a slipknot. I use a very small pinch of yarn and work in a small amount of a silicon-based floatant.

I buy fairly standard knotless tapered leaders, and add tippet to create leaders from 9 feet to 14 feet long. I put the strike indicator within a few inches of the fly line, and modify the leader length to suit the water I'm fishing. The deeper the water the longer the leader you need. I like my leader to be about 1 1/2 times the depth of the water.

The most common mistake I see is anglers using an indicator that is much too large. Use the smallest amount of yarn that you can see and will float above the surface. In this clear water, trout do see indicators, and I've seen them shy away from brightly colored gobs of yarn or corkies floating overhead. I use a color that occurs in nature; green and white work well and do not appear to spook the trout.

I attach my tippet to the leader with a triple surgeon's knot. I use fluorocarbon tippet in sizes 2X to 3X. I feel that the fluoro is stronger and more abrasion resistant than regular monofilament. My completed leader ends with a fly tied on with a Duncan Loop. I pinch on a split shot 18 inches above the fly, which is right at the tippet knot. I have experimented with many different lengths of tippet and have arrived at always tying my nymph 18 inches below the split-shot. Put the split-shot above the knot to prevent it from sliding down the tippet to the fly. I prefer split-shot over all other forms of weighting because each size of shot is a known weight and a spherical object moves or rolls across the bottom of the stream in a more natural manner that an irregularly shaped object.

Trout readily recognize the difference between a dead drifted fly and one that is dragging through the water column. When sight-casting to a specific fish, the mission is to get the fly to drift in a collision course with the fish, at or near the bottom and at the exact same speed the current is traveling. If this all sounds technical, it is. Your first measure is to determine the depth and speed of the water. This will determine the amount of weight required and the distance required to lead the fish in order to get your fly to the bottom. The trick is to lead the fish with a cast that is far enough in front of him that he is unaware of the cast but not so far as to give your fly time to hang up on the bottom. If a fly hangs on the bottom, it often spooks the fish. If I am sight casting to a fish and he is not responding to my fly, I'll change my weight before I change my fly.

My favorite way to fish the Kvichak is to drift, using a johnboat with an outboard jet motor. Drifting allows you to cover of lots of water, and show your fly to the most trout. Use long casts away from the boat since the trout will often spook and move away from a drifting boat. The fishing technique that I employ for drifting on the Kvichak is one that I developed for fishing the Colorado River at Lees Ferry. It involves getting a long, extended drift by throwing slack line out of the rod tip, onto the water, which allows the fly to travel downstream from the boat in a natural drift. The boat should be back-rowed so it is moving slower than the current. While drifting, I look for trout. It is possible, even common, to spot a fish, drift downstream, start the boat, and then motor above the spotted fish for another pass that will allow a cast and presentation to the fish.

On one memorable occasion, my wife Wendy and I, along with our guide Adam Drew, spotted five large rainbows from a drifting boat. We were able to run back upstream, drift down and land a trout on five successive passes. The trout ranged from 27 inches to 34.5 inches, and weighed from 10 to 20 pounds.

Another advantage of being in a boat is that it allows you to drift with a fighting trout as it muscles downstream. A wading angler has only two options when hooked into a big Kvichak rainbow and the fish starts barreling down current: A) run like hell, or B) palm your reel and pray. In either case, fighting a Kvichak rainbow is a challenge and experience no angler will soon forget.

Getting There
Like many rivers in Alaska, the Kvichak is remote, but well-serviced via aircraft. For the adventurous, the native village of Igiugig can be reached by air taxi from Iliamna or King Salmon. I know of no hotels, guide service or boat rental that operates out of this town. It is possible to walk down to the river from the airport but access is limited.

There are several fishing lodges located around the village near the mouth of the Kvichak River and Lake Iliamna. History abounds here; many of the lodges have existed since the 50's and early 60's. Most of these lodges are not fly-out lodges, which means that you are stuck on the river regardless of conditions. It is important to realize that not every Kvichak lodge caters to fly fishers. Some local Kvichak lodges concentrate on conventional fishing for rainbow trout and salmon, and may not be able to help you catch fish in the method that you prefer. I recommend that you ask for references from other fly-fishing customers before booking one of the lodges at the mouth of the river.

There are several fly-out lodges on the river that specialize in fly fishing. I am familiar with No See Um Lodge and Alaska Sportman's Lodge, and can personally recomend them. The others listed here have excellent reputations.

Many other fly-out lodges located in the Iliamna-Bristol Bay area keep boats on the Kvichak and access the river for day trips during the prime fishing times.