2025 Season in Review

2025 was another season to remember.  Fishing was incredible, our guests were delightful, and we created a pile of memories with a lot of new and familiar faces.

Despite the age and history of our lodge, we are not a museum of our formal self like many other classic lodges become, but instead a constantly improving and growing establishment.  We are getting better and better as we continue to learn and hone our trips to make sure you continue to have the best trip ever, year after year.  48 years in, we have a very solid program – however we are never done adapting, growing, and progressing all while keeping our long established history and culture front of mind.

Let’s take a look back on our 2025 season, starting with the fishing:

Chinook

Chinook fishing was once again exceptional this year, building on the last few years’ great productivity.  There was a slower spot in early July that we got through, but we still found everyone their fish in this rough patch before it was lights out fishing once again.  Productivity always goes through fluctuations during the season, but it was very solid overall with lots of quality control and consistent action.  Tyee numbers started slowly with one here and there, but built up as the season progressed into late August, with one guest (Dan Paulus) taking home his Chinook limit exclusively made up of tyee.  It’s been a while since we have done that…

Chinook started to taper off at the very end of August/early September but we had one nice last push of big fish for our last group September 1-5.  It was a little more work to find them for that final group on some days, but there were 2 tyee and a handful in the 20’s they were able to take home in the end.  See Petra with her 38lb monster above, caught on September 4th

COHO

Coho were an interesting fishery this past summer, being incredibly plentiful at times in July and tough to find at others, then filling in through August until a deluge of them hit in early September (a week and a half late but we were happy to see them in great numbers finally).  Size averages were way up this summer again for coho with little to no small immature fish in July as we are used to seeing, but instead many 8-14 lb fish consistently throughout the season until the end when they bulked up another few pounds with our largest coming in at 18.25 lbs.  Additionally, we had a much higher hatchery coho rate than we are used to seeing, which helped the fish boxes nicely.

SOCKEYE

Wow, it was incredible to see such an unexpectedly abundant sockeye year!  A modest projected 3,000,000 return to the Fraser river quickly escalated into deep double digit millions, with the final number yet to come.  We even had an opening in late August!  This is the first recreational sockeye opening we have had in a decade, and we had a ton of fun jigging, trolling, and casting for these beauties.

These fish are a profoundly important species ecologically, biologically, and culturally for many different peoples in BC, and their slow decline over the decades has been deeply troubling, but this dramatic uptick in their escapement numbers gives us great hope for future generations of this fish.

PINKS

A 27,000,000 forecasted return provided us with a seemingly unprecedented biomass of pinks this year.  While this forecast was adjusted, they were thick as could be there were plenty of productive spots to hide from them, off their migration route when we needed to catch our breath.  While pink fatigue is real, watching thousands of fish pass by you on the surface, jumping and feeding along the shore of Vancouver Island was one of the most memorable natural phenomena we have ever had the pleasure of witnessing.

BOTTOM FISH

We have continued our mission to find new and exciting bottom fisheries in our area.  Building on developments in our ling cod fisheries last year we found even more great fish in previously uncharted spots, as well as welcoming back reliable halibut!  We have found that June-mid July is the most productive time for our bottom fisheries as they begin to thin out towards August.

Ling cod were excellent once again, focusing on trolling swim baits as well as whole herring in local areas resulted in great catches with our heaviest coming in at 42 lbs.

Halibut have been hard for us these last few years, but despite the biomass of halibut off the entire pacific coast going down considerably in the past 2 years, there were quite a few in the water in our area once again!  No biggies off the dock this summer, but fishing the mouth of Knight Inlet brought great success.. Halibut is, and always will be a supplemental fishery for us, but it was great to get the numbers back to the dock again.

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2026