Earl Sande
I’ve had the good fortune of visiting the Ketchikan area six times in the last 20 years. Several of these fishing trips were truly an incredible experience.
One time, my friend Paul Springer needed some help bringing his 50-foot pilot house trawler back to Seattle for the winter. I flew up to Ketchikan just before Labor Day and we spent the next 16 days exploring every nook and cranny we reasonably could. We pretty much survived on fried bottom fish, crab and spot shrimp.
We headed south to spend the first night just north of DixonStrait and before dark we caught four large copper rockfish for our first fabulous fish fry. The next morning we caught four nice halibut and a few yellow eye. With a storm in the forecast, we decided to hurry to Price Rupert across open water and spend the night at the dock.
We continued south through the somewhat protected waters of the Greenville Channel. The water was about 800 feet deep, but had some under water mountains nearly reaching the surface. When fishing these spots we had no problem catching enough lingcod and rockfish for the next few dinners.
One night we anchored at the end of Khutze Inlet. This is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Lots of water falls and monster mountains with ice fields, and there are even warnings about going to shore because of so many grizzly bears. Going in there we were once 50 feet from a rock wall and the water was 1300 feet deep!
The north half of the British Columbia Inside Passage is spectacular, especially if you take the time to really explore it.
One day we stopped at an old salmon cannery town that ran from 1909 to 1966. In its heyday 500 people worked there with the Chinese workers living at the end of the bay, the Indians workers living across the bay and the white workers living in town.
We tied up to the old rundown dock and were met by an old guy by the name of Lou, along with his dog and cat. Someone from California had bought the old falling down town years ago and Lou lived there by himself as caretaker in exchange for free rent. In the early days they rendered herring oil for fuel to can the salmon, but the herring and salmon were pretty much gone by 1960 and that was the end of that.
One summer, Steve Thorniley and I flew to Ketchikan to meet up with our friend Paul with a goal of fishing and sight-seeing on his 50-footer for a 10-day trip all the way around Prince of Wales Island.
Paul found a good spot for halibut the summer before on the southwest corner of the big island. Our plan was to vacuum pack and freeze two days’ limit of halibut there, and then continue on around the island, fishing, crabbing and shrimping a little each day for a fresh supply.
The halibut fishing was almost too easy, it only took a few hours each day to catch our limit of 50 to 75-pounders, plus yellow eye and rockfish. The spot shrimp were huge and abundant. The crab weren’t everywhere, but we did manage to catch plenty.
That 10-day cruise around Prince of Wales Island was really fun. We saw whales nearly every day, and from the south end to the town of Craig we saw lots of sea otters, sometimes in groups of 50 or more.
Pink salmon were jumping everywhere pretty much all the time. Lots of bears were walking down the beaches and ,of course, tons of eagles and sea birds filling the sometimes blue sky.
Another year I flew to Ketchikan to meet up with some friends for four days of king salmon fishing. The king fishing was really good and the third day we decided to go halibut fishing near Bell Island after we caught our morning Chinooks.
The water was flat calm for our 40-mile run north to BellIsland, and we ended up with two halibut about 50 pounds each.
The run back south took a lot longer as the south wind came up and made a nasty five-foot chop. One thing about fishing in Alaska is to expect the unexpected.
Before that trip I’d never heard of BellIsland. We were told there were hot springs near the waters edge at the old salmon fishing resort.
I read a story by Dave Kiffer from Alaska explaining some of the history of BellIsland. Not surprisingly the native tribes had been using the hot springs for many hundreds of years, realizing the benefits of soaking in the hot mineral water.
Captain George Vancouver sailed near the island in 1793 and later named it Bell Island after a clerk on his ship named Edward Bell.
A group of local residents built a small bath house and tub in the early 1890s to enjoy the hot mineral water. A group of Indians from Ketchikan added to the site in 1902. Some more was built and local doctors began recommending patients go to the hot springs to soak for medical reasons.
Things changed when Wrangell resident George Roe went to the hot springs not expecting to live long because of health reasons, but after soaking in the mineral water for a few months he made a remarkable recovery. In 1904 he returned to Ketchikan and filed for a homestead on 100 acres around the hot springs.
By 1904, Roe had built two bath houses, 10 cabins and a new boardwalk. By 1909 he had built a two-story residence, a large store building and 2,000 feet of walkway. There were also 11 other houses on the property some built by other people.
Roe died in 1914 and left everything to 13 relatives, who couldn’t agree on anything, so a court administrator controlled the property until 1923. It was then sold for $8,000 to two people who didn’t get along and things regressed from there.
The resort went up for auction in 1924 with one of the disgruntled partners buying it for $24,000. In the following years a lot of progress was made on the resort. Anna Herrington worked hard and really built up the business during the next 24 years.
By the late 1930s it was one of the popular resorts in Alaska. Some people talked of big plans to make a huge resort in the 1950s, but it never happened.
Jim Dykes of Port Orchard bought the resort in 1973 and sold it to Don Peterson of Edmonds in 1978.
In 1980, the Seattle Times listed BellIsland as one of Alaska’s top 10 attractions. It was advertised in a 1982 book as “There are more salmon caught per license at BellIsland than anywhere else in Alaska.”
In 1984, a group from Texas bought the resort and before long it became a private club that was no longer open to the public. By 1993 the resort was back in the court system for not making payments, and eventually one of the Texas partners, Starkey Wilson of Dallas ended up with the resort.
The huge 50-pound-plus wild Chinook salmon were pretty much wiped out by commercial nets in the 1980s, but smaller hatchery kings can still be caught in the area.