The Bigger They Are, the Uglier They Are; and They Get Awfully Big : Sizing Up the Halibut in Alaska

Doc Bailey likes to call his little corner of Alaska the halibut capital of the world.

He’s going to have to work on that. He may even have to hire a public relations firm. So far, Gustavus doesn’t quite make it when stacked up with major league fishing destinations like Kona, Key West, Cabo San Lucas or Cairns. Or even Irvine Lake.

Of course, the mention of halibut doesn’t bring fishermen out of their fighting chairs, either. Doc promises to work on that, too.

From the end of a pier about a mile from his fishing lodge near the top of Alaska’s panhandle--that part of the state adjacent to Canada’s northwestern British Columbia--Bailey looked out on a beautiful panorama. On a cold, cloudy morning, dark, somber islands of spruce rose abruptly from tabletop-smooth inland seas, disappearing into low, dense clouds.

Aside from his four boats tied to the dock, not another boat was in sight, significant to the point Bailey was about to make.

“This is one reason why we catch so many halibut here--it’s an untapped fishing area, really,” he said. “There are a lot of halibut here and we’ve got them all to ourselves. You can fish all day in this area and not see another boat.

“People in Homer think they catch more big halibut than anywhere else. Well, we’ve had Homer people down here and they’ve all agreed with us--this is the place.”

The subject of sport fishing in Alaska usually brings to mind images of freezing cold mornings on Alaskan rivers, fishing for the noble king salmon, or fly fishing on remote, fly-in lakes for fat, iridescent rainbow trout.

Halibut, by contrast, never win beauty contests. The bigger they are, the uglier they are. And in Alaska, they get awfully big. Just last April, a fisherman working waters about 35 miles from Homer caught a 374-pounder that was 8 feet 3 inches long. But any ardent fly fishermen would positively sneer at the thought of standing on a boat, with a rod attached to something as grotesque as a salmon head or a dead herring on the bottom.

Halibut fishermen, however, claim a love for the subtleties of their sport, that suspense generated at the fingertips, when a fisherman first feels that hoped-for barn-door size halibut chewing on a bait.

One hundred-pound halibut aren’t uncommon in Alaska. They look pretty much like the halibut caught off Southern California. There’s a species variation, however. In Alaska, they’re known as Pacific halibut. The variety caught off Southern California is the California halibut and anything more than 15 pounds is considered of good size.

Guests last year at Bailey’s oasis in the Alaskan wilderness caught 114 halibut weighing more than 100 pounds each, and 20 weighing more than 200. A recent check showed this summer’s score to be 80 more than 100 pounds, 11 more than 200. The lodge will close for the season Sept. 15.

Several of Doc’s guests climbed down an iron ladder from the pier to the dock below for a morning of halibut fishing from Bailey’s Quicksilver, a 43-foot sportfisher. Alex Miller, 75, rigged up his tackle as the boat left the dock.

A mile or so from the Gustavus pier, skipper Mike Battle anchored the Quicksilver off eight-mile long Pleasant Island. Miller baited his hook with a whole herring and let out line until the weight was on the bottom, about 60 feet down.

“Keep it down there, Alex,” Battle said, “Always make sure your bait is making contact with the bottom.”

Miller is a Gustavus regular. He comes up in the spring to work the runs of silver salmon on Doc Bailey’s boats, then returns in midsummer for halibut fishing.

“I don’t know what gets me up here more, the fishing, the scenery or Ruthanne’s cooking,” he said, laughing. Ruthanne Bailey is Doc’s wife. “I know I enjoy the fishing here more than anywhere I’ve ever been before, so I guess that’s the main thing. But look at this scenery, even on a cloudy day--it’s marvelous!”

Pleasant Island rose from smooth, dark waters to Miller’s right. Straight ahead, the Chilkat Range rose high over Excursion Inlet. Beyond the Chilkat Range were Juneau and the Mendenhall Glacier, 45 miles away.

“Hey, here we go,” Miller said. His rod wobbled in his hands and he intently studied his rod tip. When the tip stopped moving, he set his hook and his rod took a dip. Twenty minutes later, he brought a halibut to the stern that seemed to be in the 20 to 25-pound class. Even under cloudy skies, the fish’s white side gleamed.

Miller released it, then caught and released a few more halibut of similar size before picking up two king salmon trolling off the east shore of Pleasant Island. Then he spent the best hours of this day on a diversion having nothing to do with fishing.

Battle spotted plumes at Hoonah Bay, on the north edge of Chichagof Island. For two hours in mid-afternoon, Miller and his friends watched a family of five bowhead whales cruise lazily a few hundred yards off the island’s beach.

It was a memorable experience, listening to the huge animals exhale in the silent marine environment just before sounding. The icy spray from their breath hung briefly in the air as they sank slowly beneath the flat, dark water. Moments later, they surfaced again, a few hundred feet away.

The only other witnesses to the whale show were about a hundred bald eagles, their white heads looking like light bulbs set against the dark spruce trees where they were perched. Eagle photography is a popular diversion for Bailey’s guests, those bearing heavy lenses. Bald eagles in Alaska’s panhandle are nearly as common as sea gulls at Marina del Rey.

In late afternoon, the whales were still cruising the beach in the same pattern, having apparently found a reliable food source near the bottom.

Miller headed the boat back to Gustavus. The feeling was one of solitude, in the biggest of states. In nearly a full day of fishing and in covering perhaps 50 miles of inland seas, only two other boats had been seen.

Said Miller, in the wheelhouse: “You get a feeling for how big this state really is, to think how much water we’ve covered today, how many islands we’ve seen . . . and to think its just a tiny piece of Alaska, so small you’d have trouble marking it on a map.”

THE OLD PILOT

Doc Bailey is 62. When he was 19, he was a mechanic for Northwest Airlines in Fairbanks. He was enrolled in a Navy preflight program when World War II ended. Immediately after the war, he flew crop dusters while attending the University of Colorado. In 1951, he became a pilot for United Airlines, and flew them all, from DC-3s to 747s.

Since Doc has been flying most of his life, he fits right in here in Alaska.

He greets many of his guests himself, at the Juneau Airport. He flies them to Gustavus, 20 minutes away, in his Cessna, even though Alaska Airlines also flies to Gustavus, population 75.

Doc will even give you a ride over America’s greatest glacial field, Glacier Bay. Most Gustavus folks like to describe their community as the gateway to Glacier Bay, but Doc’s holding out for halibut capital of the world.

“I enjoyed my years up here in the 1940s and always had it in the back of my mind that I’d like to come back to Alaska,” Bailey said.

“So when I retired from United in ‘83, we did. We’d bought this piece of property (four acres) here in ‘78, so we knew pretty much what we wanted to do.”

Bailey built a comfortable, six-room lodge--from the outside it looks like a barn--about a mile from the Gustavus pier. Building a fishing lodge where all roads lead to nowhere isn’t easy.

“I wound up barging 185,000 pounds of freight, including two trucks and a backhoe, from Seattle to here,” Bailey said. “The freight charge alone was $18,000. This is our third summer, and it’s slowly working into the kind of place we wanted it to be. In the winter, I hit the outdoors shows pretty hard. We’re getting the word out.

“Mostly, we get halibut fishermen here. We have good silver-salmon fishing in August and September, and at times it’s as good as anywhere in Alaska. But mostly we’re known for halibut, beautiful scenery, good food and calm water.”

Ruthanne runs a kitchen that produces superb meals, including a baked halibut creation made with white wine, onions, sour cream and a cheese topping. It’s so good, fat men cry.

In Gustavus, it’s the place to stay. With 75 year-round residents, there isn’t much of a selection. Gustavus, according to Bailey, has the only flat landscape in all of Southeast Alaska. A few dirt roads cut through stunted spruce forests, revealing an occasional home or two. In the summer, numerous grassy meadows are brought to color by Arctic lupine.

Oddly, the tiny community is served by jets at its 6,800-foot runway. Most arriving passengers are headed for Glacier Bay Lodge, 10 miles away, in Glacier Bay National Park, to catch tour boats for sight-seeing trips to the glaciers.

Of course, if you want to see glaciers, Doc will fly you over Glacier Bay. And a spectacular flight it is. Dozens of blue-white glaciers, some several hundred feet thick, on the edges of a 35-mile long bay. Cruise ships go by below, past thousands of chunks of ice, big and small, freshly broken off from the glaciers. Glaciers, silently, slowly, grind up granite beneath them into powder, creating the silty water color in the bay geologists call “glacial milk.”

The glaciers, geologists say, were once one mighty glacier. As recently as Captain James Cook’s time, two centuries ago, all of Glacier Bay was iced over by one immense glacier.

Time and the glaciers. Time and the halibut.

“If you want to fish this afternoon, we’d better get back,” Bailey shouted, putting the Cessna into a turn over one last ponderous glacier and heading back to Gustavus.

GUSTAVUS vs. THE WORLD In the 1984 International Game Fish Assn.’s record book, 10 line-class records were listed for Pacific halibut. Six of those record fish were caught within a 50-mile radius of the Gustavus-Juneau area, and one was caught on a boat out of the Homer area.

Homer had a big year in 1984, and raised its world-record total to five. The Gustavus-Juneau area claimed nine.

The significance of this is that Gustavus has no marina, and otherwise only the bare minimum in sportfishing facilities, and hence very little sport fishing pressure. It’s possible to fish all day and not see another fishing boat. Homer is a sportfishing town, with a marina and, by comparison, considerable sportfishing activity.

Conclusion: Your chances of catching a record halibut are at least slightly better in Gustavus than they are in Homer.

With that in mind, longtime Southern California fisherman-author Charlie Davis visited Gustavus this summer, having fully prepared to catch world-record halibut.

“I took up a special gaff, 14 inches across, because if you use a gun or a harpoon to kill a fish and bring it on boat, the IGFA will disallow it as a record,” he said.

“I also went up there with 50- and 12-pound test Dacron line, 50 for a shot at a really big fish and the 12 for a situation where if we got into some big fish I’d have a chance at a couple of records in the mid-size classes.

“In five days, I caught about 90 halibut, releasing most of them. I had six over 75 pounds and one right at 100. A lady at the lodge caught a 136-pounder on 50-pound, which is a pending world record.

“I didn’t get that world-record fish, but the fishing was tremendous, really. At times, it was like we were albacore fishing. There were several occasions when, with six to eight people on board, we’d have everyone hooked up to halibut.

“Halibut as a sport fish is really underrated. Years ago at Catalina, I saw a halibut on the surface, chasing bait.

“They’re really an unpredictable fish. I was yellowtail fishing at Catalina once, cast some bait into a school of yellowtail and hooked a halibut, right on the surface.

“That’s not normal behavior for halibut, of course. Normally, the tricky part of halibut fishing is figuring out when they’ve swallowed the bait. When you feel a halibut on your line, chances are he’s crushing the bait with his mouth, and that’s not the time to set the hook.

“Another important part is that you should be in free spool, letting line slowly go out through your fingers. If you’re in gear, you’ve created a tension situation that isn’t natural.

“But it’s that waiting, the figuring out what’s happening at the other end of the line. To me that’s the joy of halibut fishing.”