Spey

5 Reasons to Fish Week One

April 5, 2013

You might have heard that Alaska West runs a spey instruction program during our king salmon season – we bring the best casters and teachers in the world to the lodge to help you get better with your casting. Charles St. Pierre is our longtime instructor during the first week of our season. Today he [...]

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Alaska Fishing Guide Secrets

February 7, 2013

Today we’re starting up a series of posts on Alaska Guide Secrets. Various members of our guide crew at Alaska West will pass on some tricks of their trade, and you’ll be the ones the benefit. Our first post comes from Adam Kryder. Take it all in! Don’t guess the depth of the run – [...]

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Bougle Contest Winner – Tom Ehrhard’s Steelhead Rig

January 8, 2013

We’re thrilled to present to you the winner of a brand new Hardy Bougle, courtesy of our ‘Tell Us About Your Steelhead Rig’ contest. Tom Ehrhard took this one home with his entry that appears in its entirety below. Before we get to Tom’s rig though, we need to say a few things. You folks [...]

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Sage 7126-4 ONE Steelhead Spey Rod Review

November 15, 2012

We recently got the chance to spend some time fishing another one of Sage’s new ONE spey rods – the 7126-4. Today you get to hear what we thought about it. We’ve written up two other ONE spey rods – here are our reviews of the 8136-4 ONE and the 10130-4 ONE. Design The 7126-4 [...]

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Really Heavy Skagit Heads

November 2, 2012

If you followed our blog much this summer, you may remember that we ran a series of king salmon spey rod reviews based on our experience fishing during the early season at BC West. If you missed that series, here’s the wrap up post. We tend to follow spey tech pretty closely, but in the [...]

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Spey Line Recommendations

October 29, 2012

It’s really, really important to figure out the right line for your spey rod. Much more so than with single-handed rods, two-handed rods (spey and switch) cast completely differently depending on which line you’ve got them set up with. Things have gotten a lot simpler in the past few years, but still…it’s not always obvious [...]

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Skagit Casting – Keep Your Hands Close

September 25, 2012

When you’re making spey casts in the Skagit style, try to keep your hands as close to your body as possible! Ed Ward, long-time guide at Alaska West and one of the fathers of Skagit-style spey casting, has been called “the man who can spey cast inside a phone booth”. That’s a bit of an [...]

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Echo3 7130 – Why We Like It

August 14, 2012

We recently had a chance to spend some time fishing ECHO’s new Echo3 7130 on the Deschutes River in Oregon. As you might have guessed, this is a 13 foot rod for a 7 weight line – a great format for steelhead fishing on lots of water in the Northwest. We fished the 7130 with [...]

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King Salmon Spey Rod Roundup

August 7, 2012

Today we wrap up our mini-series of posts about spey rods designed for king salmon. We started the series back on July 4th, with a post introducing the concepts surrounding spey rods purpose-built for kings. Based on our testing at BC West during the first week of our 2012 season, we ran reviews of 4 [...]

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