For us there are 4 criteria:

1. Best weather (historically driest): May through June (believe it or not)
2. Silver salmon: July - September
3. King salmon: May through June best (but still really good fishing through mid Aug… although sometimes there are so many darn silvers biting that it's hard to catch a king). Our catch rates are better than Sitka's (less competition) and 2 to 25 times better than anywhere else! 
4. Halibut, sablefish, rockfish and lingcod fishing is evenly great ALL season long! The best time might be when we have an opening. 

We have the biggest halibut in all of Alaska... 3 times bigger than Sitka, Seward and Homer. Our king salmon catch rate is the very best in the state (ten times and a hundred times better than most other locations). One of the best things about fishing with the Highliner is that we can catch salmon, halibut, lingcod, and black rockfish everyday. Most places you only catch salmon on one day and halibut, lingcod and rockfish on another day. Also, we can keep 2 halibut per day. Many other places you can only keep one small halibut!

Usually, we fish for salmon until around lunch time and then fish for halibut in the afternoon. More than half of our fishermen limit out on king salmon and halibut on the same day. We target lingcod and rockfish if we haven’t caught them incidental to fishing for halibut and they are relatively easy to catch. Our guests averaged 120 pounds of fillets over the last five years, after 4 days of fishing!