AK Dollys in creeks, a personal AK favorite

One of my favorite things about AK is the most certainly the dollys. Most any creek with a salmon run up there "should" have dollys. Some of them come from the ocean behind the running salmon while others are residents of large lakes. If salmon travel through the lake to a spawning destination, dollys will pick up and follow the salmon as the pass through the lake. This was exactly the case were I fished this year for several days with Mike and Nick Braun. We made it a priority to spend at least 4 days working creek dollys with lighter fly tackle. We used inicator driven custom trout beads behind spawning sockeye on 4 to 6 weight fly flickers.







A very nice shot by Nick Braun, spawning sockeye salmon, the source of food the dollys key on.

Dollys average 12 to 19 inchs but can get much larger with qaulity river conditions such as gravel or long seasons showing several runs of salmon to feed from. You can score rainbows while working dollys with beads since they are feeding on the same thing. Fish can be caught right out from under the tail of the salmon in some places so presentation is very important. The bead and the indicator must be in a perfect line from upstream to downstream. A broadside presentaion will only foul hook the sockeye and kings your trying desperatly to avoid.







Double and tripple hookups are common when things are going right but someone has to take the photos! While most of the dollys seem to be a nice 18 inch average they start to seem very big when they reach the over 20 mark. My big fish for the creek stuff this year was a big male around 23, but at that size they have a huge head and are very deep in girth. They are just beautiful at that size..... Believe me when I tell you that I was within inchs of loosing this fish on my 6 weight to a very healthy Alaskan log jam!







Photos by Nick Braun [cept the one of him and the one of him and his dad with the double,lol]


Big thanks to my friends at Lamiglas Rods, those fly rods kicked butt!