56.0°

It might still look more like Christmas outside than springtime, but diehard anglers have been doing well plying the open water of the upper, and upper middle Kenai River in recent weeks.

A generally warm spring has peeled back the ice on the river and opened up the landings, allowing both shore anglers and boaters to access the Kenai's teal blue waters surrounded by still snowy mountains.

Robert Begich, the area sportfish management biologist for the Department of Fish and Game in Soldotna said that while he'd been getting good reports from the Kenai, he had yet to hear anything from the Kasilof River to the south.

The warm spring however has made for a somewhat early end to the ice-fishing season.

Begich said ice conditions on many of the area lakes and ponds have deteriorated.

"There's probably a little bit that's still going on," he said, "but there's horrible conditions because of overflow."

Begich said that in the last few years he's kept a record of when a few area lakes finally became ice free, and typically it's not until about May 8.

That doesn't mean these bodies of water will be unfishable until then, however.

Begich said that once the ice pulls away from the shore and opens up a little, anglers could cast from the bank toward the receding ice line and generally do quite well.

"The lake water is all the same temperature so the fish are all over the place," he said.

Depending on the weather, some water bodies might be fishable in this manner in a few weeks.

The Peninsula's southern streams remain closed until the season openers in May.

Nicky Szarzi, Fish and Game's area sportfish management biologist in Homer, said that the king fishing on Kachemak Bay this winter has been "fairly good."

Though the feeding schools of fish, which hail from as far away as the Pacific Northwest, tend to move around the bay as they follow their food, she said anglers have been doing particularly well near Seldovia.

As Cook Inlet salmon begin to move back into the area in the coming weeks, Szarzi said the trolling success should continue to pick up.

She said she'd also heard of a "smattering" of halibut stories, but that for the most part anglers were targeting salmon and not the flatfish.

She also said that clammers on the hunt in Ninilchik might find lot of small clams in that area this season because of high recruitment. This is good news in the long run but could make this season challenging.

"It's going to cause people some frustration if they're trying to find clams to eat," she said. "They're going to be encountering a lot of little maturing clams."

Tightlines regular weekly fishing forecasts will begin May 20 in preparation for the first opening on the Anchor River.