A developing theme

Since arriving in Alaska, few things have been as predictable as me getting out-fished by The Wife. After yesterday's evening foray, she's up 3-2. However, if you dig a little deeper into the record books, you'd realize I had to go fishing twice by myself to keep the score as close as it is. Otherwise, I'd be staring down a 3 point deficit trying to decide if it's time to throw in the towel. Perhaps I will win out yet, and persistent once again will triumph over skill. Or, maybe not.

Yesterday was an exploratory mission. We didn't even leave the house until nearly 5:00, so, looking back, yesterday's trip would totally be doable after work. We drove for about 1 1/2 hours, wasting about a third of that looking for a good spot to access the river. There were spawned-out pinks out the wazoo, but expectations raised a bit when we ran into another couple holding fly rods and hiking out with a few silvers. As a totally anecdotal aside, it seemed that all the hardware chuckers were snagging pinks while the fly angers were managed to hook into mostly coho.

After a few minutes of hiking, we found a suitable spot without too much competition from other anglers and geared up. The Wife moved downstream just a bit and, before too long, was screaming and hollering in her typical "I got a fish" manner.
The bank-side brush was overgrown and the shore was really rocky so I lent a hand in landing the first of her three silvers.
Who says you can't look good with a big ol' flower on your fly vest?
After I helped land the first fish, The Wife wanted to run the show solo from there on out. She hooked and landed another smaller coho before eventually grabbing onto another biggin.
With The Wife having run a clinic up to this point, it finally was my turn to get in on the action. It must have been the new-school low-rider waders that finally did the trick...
With The Wife wrecking havoc with the silvers, I hooked lip with a nice chum, somewhat making up for the chum I lost a while back.
They sure are crazy-looking fish. Where coho are more apt to make a few strong runs, chums prefer bulling you around the depths for most of a fight. They're a very different fish, that's for sure.
Understandably, The Wife has been pretty proud of herself and her fishing conquests. However, in order to fully understand the irony of yesterday's tally, a little background information is in order. You see, The Wife went to Juneau a week or so ago and had plans to go fishing. Although unable to put line to water, she did manage to wrestle a number of flies out of my box and into hers. One of which was this hotrod, the only fly of its kind in either of our boxes yesterday. Fish weren't interested in black and pink, red and purple, purple and black, or pink and pink . . . just pink and purple. Time to hit up the tying bench . . .