One To Show Your Grandchildren

Want to catch a truly enormous silver salmon? For Matt Harris, the only place to go is Patagonia.

- Matt Harris

MOST SALMON ANGLERS dream of catching a truly vast salmon. Who hasn’t spent a few minutes imagining that moment when your fly is snatched away by a true leviathan? A monster. A fish to show your grandchildren.

That dream is one that few will realise. The huge Atlantic salmon of yesteryear are all but a memory in most of our home rivers, and the true titans – fish of 40lb and more – are now extremely rare anywhere apart from Norway’s legendary Alta. 

Yet there is a place. 

A place where big, chrome-silver fish of 30lb barely raise an eyebrow. A place where fish of 40lb, 50lb, even 60lb are eminently catchable on fly.

Before you get too excited, there is one big caveat. The fish I’m talking about are not Atlantic salmon, but Oncorhynchus tshawytscha – the Chinook or king salmon.

Be clear. Chinook are not Atlantic salmon. Whereas Atlantic salmon possess a rare bewitching beauty, and have a playful capricious quality that keeps us coming back time and again, Chinook are different. They are big ugly brutes that bulldoze up the river with all the grace of an underwater rhinoceros. 

Chinook don’t take a Bomber fly or a riffle hitch. 

If you want to catch a Chinook, you can forget your long leader and your full floating line. Unless the water is very, very low, you are going to have to “hoik”some brutally heavy tungsten sink-tips across the river, with a big flashy fly that snaps one of these big brutes out of their torpor.

Make no mistake. Catching kings with a fly is hard graft. Very hard graft. A long attritional war that makes early spring fishing on the Tay look like child’s play.

Chinook fishing is not pretty. For the most part it’s crude and ugly and lacks all the aesthetic elegance of Atlantic salmon fishing.