In late April the Taku is only just breaking up. Shelf ice still lines the banks, the snow is soft, and the river runs low and clear before the melt takes hold. The first boats up from tidewater find
steelhead in the runs, and
bull trout and
Dolly Varden in numbers. No road reaches any of it.
The Taku is a short river with a long reach. It takes its name where two big rivers out of the interior, the Inklin and the Nakina, meet at a place called Inklin. From there it runs as a braided, glacier-fed river down to the last big tributary, the Tulsequah, and over the border into Alaska, where it widens toward a long inlet near Juneau. Think of it in three parts: the meeting of the rivers, the run to the border, and the clear water that feeds both.
The meeting of the rivers is the top of the Taku and the most remote part of it. Paddling and rafting parties come down the Inklin to reach it, and from here the river carries everything the interior sends down, steelhead and bull trout included. If you are floating through to the coast, this is where the Taku begins for you.
The run to the border is the stretch most anglers actually fish, by jet boat up from Juneau. It is big, coloured and always moving its channels: a run that held fish one spring can be a shallow riffle the next. Steelhead come in spring, and from early summer five kinds of salmon pass through on the way to their spawning water. Start low, near the border, and work up as far as the channels let you.
The clear water is the reward. The Taku carries the largest
cutthroat trout population in Southeast Alaska as well as rainbows, grayling and
lake trout, and much of the best fishing is up the clear tributaries and side channels, where salmon stack in the gravel holes in August and char and rainbows lie behind them eating eggs. One of those streams, glacier-fed and still gin clear, is the kind of place where you watch a king rest beside the current before you cast.
Above the meeting of the rivers, the Nakina and the Inklin each have water of their own, and the Taku’s clear side streams are a long way from fished out.
Water and habitat
The main Taku is glacial, cold and silty through summer, and its gravel channels shift with every flood. Fish use it as a highway. They hold where the current eases and where clear water comes in: the seams below a side channel, the tail of a run, the deep green scour holes in a clear tributary. In spring, before the melt, the main river runs low enough and clear enough to fish its runs directly.
How to fish it
For spring steelhead, swing a dark streamer on a sinking-tip line across and down through the runs, slowing the swing as it comes into the soft water. If a run that should hold fish gives you nothing, go deeper before you go elsewhere; then move, because the channels change and fish move with them.
In August’s clear water, sight-fish. Kings rest off the main current in singles and pairs: cast well upstream of a fish so the fly reaches its depth as it arrives, swinging and dead-drifting it through. A big pink or purple rabbit-strip streamer with a cone head is the fly, on a 9-weight. For the char and rainbows behind spawning salmon, change to a single egg fly dead-drifted through the holes, and keep it near the bottom. Wading is dangerous on the Taku’s fast, cold, loose gravel; fish from the edge where you can.
Access and safety
Most anglers come by jet boat from Juneau, a long run upriver past a lodge on the Alaska side that sells fuel; others fly in by floatplane, or float down from the Inklin. Coming up from Alaska you cross into Canada on the water, and everyone entering Canada by boat must report to the Canada Border Services Agency without delay. Fuel, weather and ice decide early-season boat days, and logs block channels.
The Tulsequah empties glacial lakes most summers, usually in June or July, sending a flood down the Taku that takes a few days to rise and fall, carrying debris and colder water. Watch the forecasts from Juneau before and during any summer visit. Grizzlies and black bears are throughout the valley: make noise walking to the river, carry bear spray, and give the Tlingit fish camps along the river room.
Regulations
The Taku has no rules of its own in BC’s Skeena Region tables, so the regional and provincial rules govern it; check in-season changes at gov.bc.ca/FishingRegulations. You fish one fly on a single barbless hook. Release all wild steelhead, and buy a Steelhead Conservation Surcharge Stamp to fish for them. Rivers and streams in the region close to steelhead fishing from 15 May to 15 June; the Taku’s main river is exempt, but its tributaries are not. Release all Dolly Varden and bull trout taken from streams. You may keep one trout a day from streams between 1 July and 31 October, if it is 30 cm or over, inside a trout and char quota of 5 with no more than one over 50 cm; release trout of any size from 1 November to 30 June. The grayling quota is 3, whitefish 15 (all species combined). Fisheries and Oceans Canada sets the salmon rules. Where a tributary runs through a conservancy, the Park Act applies too. Below the border you fish under Alaska’s regulations, not BC’s.