Alaska Part 2

I was quite ready to leave bear central campsite.  After the bear encounter the previous evening, my adrenaline levels were through the roof. It was kind of like shooting a big buck, focused when you shoot, followed by full body shakes when its over, except it took hours to come down. 

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We had a big float ahead of us that day, 12 miles of the most amazing scenery.  Some memorable fish were caught including watching a giant male sockeye turn and eat a pink streamer followed by 3 or 4 ridiculous attempts to net it from the moving boat before jumping out and chasing it down the river only to net it and have it flop back out of the net and then have to do it all over again.  After that fish we made a rule, no salmon from the boat! My boat partner Andy got a really nice king, and I landed a trophy Rainbow and Dolly Varden tight line nymphing a small streamer. We did have a sketchy incident with the last boat in the group. They got hung up in a double strainer on a narrow technical piece of water.  I think they were distracted because they were fighting a big rainbow.  Long story short they lost an oar and the backup oar was downriver on another boat.  Thankfully we found the oar floating down the river ahead of them and were about to send up the drone to locate them before they came bouncing around the bend using their net and a single oar to navigate.  Not a good scenario 100 miles in the wilderness. They were pretty shook up, and it sounds like they were pretty fearful of flipping the boat and drowning in the fast deep current.


Our campsite that day was the best of the trip, surrounded by mountains and loaded with fish.  After days on edge, something felt right about where we had gotten.  I am not a real religious person, but I do believe we are connected to the earth, or something greater than ourselves.  Being at that place and at that time was one of those moments.  Sitting around the campfire, I decided to grab my binoculars and glass the mountains. I could see a tiny patch of snow way off in the distance with the naked eye.  When I glassed the patch of snow I was amazed to see a perfect smiley face in the snow! It was as if nature was letting us know that all was going to be ok and we were welcome in this place. That night I left the tent in the early pre dawn hours and watched a brown bear fishing about 100 yards away.


From then on the days began to blend together. The weather got very warm and sunny. 20 hours of sun a day for a week was a lot.  All of us were prepared to suffer through cold temps and heavy rain. Instead were were battling sun burn, bloody chapped lips and cracked hands. Animal sightings dwindled, after a day or so I was missing the excitement of seeing bears. Clearly they didn’t approve of the weather either. You could not step foot on a piece of river bank without fresh tracks, but all of the animals were moving at night.  We had a pack of wolves come through one of our camp sites while we were sleeping.  


While the animal sightings decreased, thankfully the fishing was getting better.  Dolly Varden were so plentiful you could catch hundreds upon hundreds if you chose to.  We began seeing more silver colored sockeye which were turned into sushi. Big Chum salmon also began showing up and would eat a streamer more aggressively than the Sockeye or Kings. The novelty of catching massive colored up salmon had kind of worn off and it got to the point where we were trying not to catch them.  The males grew huge gnarly teeth that would rip your hands apart, and it would take a long time to land one, especially if you were fishing with your 6 wt trout/charr/grayling rod.  We had a ton of fun mousing in the evenings. It all was a matter of how you chose to fish.  We even did some dry fly fishing for grayling. A few of my favorite days were when we spent two nights at a single campsite, which gave us a full day to explore miles long braids and tributaries. Our campsites on the two day stays were strategically selected based on satellite images to make sure we had access to good wade fishing water.   The braids and tributaries were loaded with spawning salmon while trophy Rainbows and Dollie’s munched on eggs and provided amazing sight fishing in shallow clear water. It was a fun change from the main river which had now probably tripled in size from its start at the outlet of the lake.