RON PITTARD GRAPHIC
TEXT BY DENNIS BITTON

A Senator from Idaho once remarked she was certain all the talk about salmon becoming extinct was nonsense, because she could go to the local grocery store and buy salmon anytime she wanted. The sad fact is, she was serious. Sadder still for sockeye salmon, it's mostly their species in the stores. The reason is quite simple, they have the reddest, tastiest flesh. High in oil, low in fat, sockeye are the salmon of choice at all good restaurants, discriminating homes and fish eaters everywhere.

Fresh-run sockeye salmon (above) are chrome-bright fish with a lot of fight in them. As they mature in freshwater, their heads turn green, and their bodies crimson (below).

Not all sports fishermen think highly of sockeye, claiming the fish run too deep and in thick side-to-side schools that prevent most fish from even seeing a presented lure or fly. Others have accepted fact as a challenge and developed fly patterns and various forms of sinking lines, to entice the red-meated quarry.

Like all Pacific salmon, sockeye are silver colored in the ocean. In freshwater, male sockeye turn a brilliant red. Hundreds of them on the bottom of a small stream make it look like the stream bottom is red, and moving! Females also have a redish hue, but their body colors are more drab than the males, consisting of a somewhat olive green color, with darker sides.

Sockeye cover a geographic range somewhat larger than than that of the other species of Pacific salmon. The Klamath River in northern California marks their southern extreme, and they're in coastal rivers clear around the Pacific Rim to Japan. But most sport fishing for sockeye salmon is done in Alaska.

In the Bristol Bay area of Alaska, sockeye are still migrating in the millions. It's one of the few places in the world you can see a natural spectacle that's literally thousands of years old. Some people come back saying the site was more impressive than the fishing, and the fishing was fantastic. Sockeyes thrive in river systems with a lake at the head, and seek out the lake's many small tributaries to spawn. Thousands of pairs will often spawn in a relatively condensed area, which is great for nature watching, but calamitous when a natural disaster strikes.

Even at maturity, sockeyes are not large fish. Most fishermen will catch sockeyes weighing between four and nine pounds. Larger specimens will weigh as much as 10 pounds. Sockeye salmon are at their peak when they first enter the rivers. They are a strong, chrome-colored fish then, and some sockeye addicts say they fight as well as a chinook salmon, pound for pound. The problem is, at this stage they travel in huge schools, often tip-to-tail, making it difficult to present a fly without snagging a fish, or startling the whole group. When you can achieve a good presentation, the fish are often so focused on their upstream migration that they'll ignore your offering and just keep moving.

Some truly skilled anglers can convince these fish to take a fly, but a great many fish are brought to the beach by "lining," an unsporting practise where the fly line is drawn through the mouth of a passing fish until the hook catches in the opposite side of the mouth. As the fish sexually mature in fresh water, they become much more aggressive and territorial, and will go out of their way to attack a passing fly. But becuase their physical reserves are so low at this point, and the meat wasted, they are more of a nuisance than a gamefish.