Jacks

I spent much of the past couple weeks in Southeast.  It was hard to be away from the kiddo, but it was good to get back to the real Alaska.  As I've said many times, Anchorage is an alright town . . . and its less than 30 minutes from Alaska.  But there's something special about Southeast.  Sure it's cold and it rains too damned much, but it feels as much like home as anywhere else I've been.

Your taxi has arrived.

While I would have loved to chase fish the whole time, I was on a work trip so much of my time was stuck in meetings.  Meetings about how to protect the Tongass and the incredible salmon runs it produces.  Meetings about how local communities might take advantage of burgeoning tourism and recreation to diversify and strengthen their local economies.  And meetings where I had to bite my tongue listening to people stuck in the past proposing yet another government handout in a region drowning in federal subsidies so the fortunate few can have a job clearcutting the last of our best national forest.  Oh, and in case it isn't obvious, your tax dollars (not mine, I'm an Alaskan*) would pay for all this.

While I could ride this soap box like it's a winning derby racer, this is a fishing blog so . . .

* * *

One of the great things about fishing--even when you're on water you've hit dozens or hundreds of times--is that you never really know what to expect.  Chase salmon in small or medium-sized streams and it gets even more unpredictable.  Add in the fact that I hadn't fished this water since 2005 (on my wedding day, no less) and I really didn't know what I'd find.

An old friend at low flows.

As expected, a little late for the pinks.

I only had a few hours after my meetings before it got dark.  While I figured most of the salmon runs were done, I held out hope that I might find decent flows and hook into a few dollies; if I was luckly, maybe I'd find a coho.

Pink redds exposed by low flows.

Coho are amazing fish.  Generally, they hatch in spring, spend a year-and-a-half or so in fresh water, migrate out to the ocean for a year or two, then return to their natal stream to spawn.  However, like many salmon, a very small portion of coho salmon (usually males) may never go out to the ocean or may only spend a very brief period in salt water before spawning.  Usually, these younger spawners, sometimes called jacks, only account for a very small fraction (maybe 1% or less) of the total spawning population.  I had seen a handful of Chinook and steelhead jacks during my prior work, but never seen a coho jack.  Somehow I found the mother lode.

A chrome coho about 14 inches long caught swinging an FMF.

Pulled out from right on top of the last one.

Another, for scale

While I would have loved to hook into one of their older (and larger) brethren, I managed to grab onto four of these mini coho and a couple coastal cutthroat.  It certainly wasn't what I expected, especially considering the odds, but a pretty good time nonetheless.

I went to bed that night excited for the next evening when I had a little more time to get out after my meetings.  Of course, it rained like it only can in Southeast and when I went to the river the next day the water had raised about three feet.  Standing ankle deep in the river but ten feet back into the woods, I made a dozen or so halfhearted casts into the milky-mud flow before turning back and calling it a day.

With any luck, the people who want to privatize the Tongass and turn it into a stump farm won't get their way and, when I return next time, the flows will be perfect and every coho will have spent at least two years in the ocean.

* Yes, I too pay federal taxes.  But the state pays me and this too often is the mentality up here.

What's for dinner?

Southeast Alaska white king, Bristol Bay Chinook, bean sprout pilaf and peanut slaw.

The Wife and I provided the fish; the red onion, scallions, cilantro and parsley came from the garden; and the cabbage and carrots came from local farms.  The beer (not pictured) came from California.  You can't call it all local, but it's getting close.

Sheep!

When I tell people I live in Anchorage, they often make the mistake of thinking I live in Alaska.  Sadly, I do not.  I live 20 minutes from Alaska.  However, now that the days are getting longer 20 minutes isn't so bad.  Here's what went on after work yesterday:

Karta, showing Evan and I the way up:

Go go gadget zoom (there actually were three):

Self-shot by The Wife looking out over Turnagain Arm:

Doug getting after it:

Evan, not afraid of refreezing sun-baked mush:

Karta and I pushed on past the rest of the crew to the saddle, eventually getting an up-close-and-personal view of the sheep from above and milking about 2,200 vertical feet out of the day:

It's been snowing off-and-on for the past week, and temperatures have been warming.  We were skiing on 6-8 inches of fresh that had warmed up during the day and was started to refreeze as the evening wore on.  Not bad, all and all.  Of course, the sheep were a great bonus.

Out of the office

I've been traveling a ton over the past few weeks--Juneau three weeks ago, Seattle last week, and now back to southeast.  Of course, not all work travel is bad:

Getting ready for winter

The days are getting noticeably shorter, the weather's turned cold, and the snow line is working its way down the mountains toward town.  This means two changes around the house:

First, The Wife and I have been spending a bit more time gathering firewood.

We have about 2 1/2 cords collected from down trees in a friend's yard.  I reckon we'll add another cord to the pile.

Second, the moose are back in numbers.  This bull was eating what's left of our front flowers about a week ago:

And this cow found her way onto our front porch a couple days ago:

These hoof prints were about two feet from our front door.  I think they're moving in.

A couple lessons learned:

1) Nothing makes you forget losing a 30+ inch rainbow like seeing a bear charge* your wife.

2) Always keep your bear spray/gun on your person.


*The Wife maintains that the bear merely came at her in an aggressive manner, but did not "charge."  A distinction without a difference, I say.

More fun with Pebble

I didn't make it out to the fair this year, but seeing stuff like this in my inbox makes me wish I had:

You can click the picture to see a larger version in all its glory.  When combined with the more subtle sticker improvements I posted about a couple weeks ago, maybe Pebble will get the hint.

They had it coming

The Pebble Partnership, proponents of what might be the most obscene mine around, is about as slimy a corporation as it gets.  In their never-ending quest to down play the fact that the Pebble Mine would completely destroy one of the most productive fisheries in the state, they've been sponsoring every public event in Alaska, including the state fair (click to enlarge, and pay special attention to the eye):

Put this in the "The Wife's job is better than mine" category

While I was slaving away this past week behind a desk, The Wife was posing as a client for the Bristol Bay Fly Fishing Academy.

She calls this "work."  And while that's debatable, the Academy is a pretty cool program that helps young locals learn the tools of the guiding trade and (hopefully) find work with local lodges and outfitters.  They needed someone to act as a client for the guides-in-training, which is where The Wife comes in.

From the Bristol Bay Fly Fishing Academy website:

Most people who visit Bristol Bay want to fish. And most of them want to fish with a local, home-grown guide who knows the waters, the wildlife, the people and the way of life here. That’s why we’re training the region’s young people to explore careers as guides – so they might stay in the region, earn a prosperous living, advocate for the health of the watershed and offer visitors an authentic experience of one of our country’s most special natural places.

Of course, if they're gainfully employed in the sport fishing industry, they're less likely to advocate for the development of a huge copper mine that would destroy local sport fishing.

Back in Alaska

Both my camera and The Wife are out of town for the week.  I meant to download some pictures from last week and do a trip report of sorts from my recent trip back to Oregon, but forgot.  Suffice it to say that small stream fishing in a high desert ponderosa forest is every bit as awesome as it's cracked up to be.  The Wife being gone sucks though.

Back in Alaska, the fish are in--pinks out the wazoo, coho, chums. . .  Karta found a giant Chinook carcass yesterday.  Maybe 40 pounds.  There's something about bushwhacking along the salmon-lined banks of a deafening river in griz country that makes you feel alive.  Stepping around heaping piles of bear shit when you can't see or hear past your nose makes you keep your trigger finger at the ready, if nothing else.  I think I'll wait until I have a more responsible companion than Karta before going back there again.  You know, someone who carries their own bear deterrent instead of acting as an attractant.

Dry flies!

Having had some luck chasing rainbows with my Dad the other day, The Wife, Sam, Liz and I headed out fishing yesterday.  Being a Saturday, we weren't too sure what to expect with the crowds.  But, like most places up here, you just need to walk a ways down the trail to leave the circus behind.  Of course, other people weren't our only competition:

This river is fast and strong, and quite productive.  It doesn't have much typical holding water, but those holding spots that do exist are obvious and, with some aggressive wading to get near the pockets and creative casting to avoid the stream-side vegetation, it's possible to get a decent drift.

Living in Alaska is great, but one of the things I miss most about fishing down south is dry fly fishing.  Casting big streamers to big fish with heavy rods is fun, and chuck-and-duck tactics have their merits, but it's tough to beat a rising fish--something that doesn't come around too often up here.  Thus, I was a bit surprised when, after starting the day with some split shot and an egg and flesh pattern that had proven productive in the past, we started noticing fish hitting the surface.

At first, I spotted a couple smaller fish rising near the edges of a nice run.  I had noticed a couple different types of mayflies dancing around earlier in the day, including what looked like a large drake of some sort.  But because I had in the past seen numerous stoneflies, caddis and mayflies on other waters without so much as a single fish rising, I was reluctant to give up on my streamers and split shot.

After Sam landed two fish in short order on a small stimulator, including one that ran in the mid-teens, I finally relented and re-rigged for surface action.  After all, one fish is a fluke, but two in a row is a pattern.

Within my first half-dozen casts with a dry, this guy came to hand pushing the twenty-inch mark:

Once we started using dry flies, the fish didn't seem particularly picky.  I ended up catching fish on three different dry flies.  So long as the drift was dead and your fly was in a decent pocket, it seemed like something would give it a look.  Of course, since I was on the far side of the river from everyone else, my pictures of other people's fish are from a distance.  Here's one of The Wife's:

And a couple artsy fartsy pictures from the point and shoot:

A gluttonous tragedy

I first ventured to Alaska in earnest in 2003, well after the heyday, to work a seasonal fisheries job for the U.S. Forest Service in southeast Alaska.  I had just been accepted to law school and was looking for one last epic opportunity to chase fish. 

You really ought to click that picture and make it a bit bigger.

Having, to that point, been almost exclusively a catch-and-release angler who valued fish first and foremost for their intrinsic and sporting value, I was disgusted to see people with readily-available alternative food sources setting gill nets across entire stream widths that effectively blocked entire salmon runs, dipnetting more than they possibly could consume in a single year, and generally killing everything in sight in an orgy of overabundance and shortsightedness.  Yeah, your freezer might be full this winter, but what about the winter a few years from now?

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to later learn that one of the most prolific sockeye fisheries in that area had been closed.  From a 2008 news release:

The weir count to date is 90 sockeye. The weir count in 2007, as of the same date, was 2765 . . .

***

As I eluded to in my last post, The Wife and I spent the Fourth of July weekend fishing and camping.  I had pulled an all-nighter on Thursday in order to meet a work deadline and was in no condition to go anywhere after work on Friday but bed.  It had been a rough week.

Come Saturday morning, we geared up and headed north with our good friends Sam and Liz.  Because King Season was in full swing, we had planned to avoid the combat-fishing crowds and target areas farther up stream for rainbows.  Seemed to make sense at the time since few things repulse me more than rubbing shoulders on the stream bank with people too self interested to see beyond the tip of their fishing rod. 

From some exploring I had done last year, I had some ideas about where to go.  We drove down a too-narrow-for-my-truck two-track road to the river with hopes that we might have the place to ourselves.  Of course, we did not:

The first day only afforded us an afternoon on the water before calling it and heading back to the rig to set up camp and cook some grub.  Of course, the camera wasn't around when I hooked into my best fish--a feisty rainbow around 20" that almost got away from me down a side channel on the far side of the river.  By the time the camera came back, all I had to show for my efforts was this stick, broken roughly to the proper length and every bit as exciting to Karta as the real thing:

With the camera back in tow, Liz grabbed a hold of this guy:

 Got's to put forth the effort (there's a dog in there too):

Of course, it rained all night and by morning the too-narrow-for-my-truck two-track road turned into a too-muddy-for-my-truck two-track road:

Yeehaw!  With much coercion, we forced things along and made it back to pavement after only an hour or two delay.

While neither The Wife nor I managed to take a single picture for the remainder of Sunday the Fourth, we worked our way north, exploring new streams before ultimately enjoying beers in Talkeetna, then turning back to a nearly vacant campground that allowed us to stretch our legs a bit.  We definitely saw more people on the water than I cared to see, but I can't complain about the crowds where we chose to camp.

Having fished hard for two days with very limited success (no fish were caught on Sunday), we headed back to a familiar stream hoping to up our catch rate.  Sam found some Chinook schooling up in this big bend:

And soon thereafter we started hooking fish:

And the rainbow version:

The Wife sending it:

After all was said and done, we had had a great weekend.  We fished hard, ripped a little lip, shotgunned a couple PBRs, and generally had a great time--but something was missing.  Something was off.  For the peak of Chinook season, we only saw a handful of salmon.  There might have been more people on some of these creeks than salmon.

Little did I know, since we were planning to chase rainbows all along, but the Chinook fishery was in such dire straights that it had been closed.  This is Alaska folks.  What the hell?

Thinking back to my days in southeast Alaska, I couldn't help but wonder about the individual and collective greed that likely led to these low salmon abundance numbers.  Apparently, I'm not the only one with these thoughts.  In more eloquent words that I might provide, you really ought to give this opinion piece by a Mr. Wittshirk a read.  It's better fare than anything the ADN typically provides.

Since it's late, I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions here . . . but I can't help but look for some sort of lesson.  With our ridiculous history of overfishing and short-term fisheries management--in southeast Alaska, here locally, and in nearly every other fishery in the world--perhaps . . .

Some people call this fishing

We took the interns* to float the upper Kenai on Thursday from Cooper Landing to Jim's Landing.

One of the most ridiculous things about the Kenai is the combat fishing at the Russian.  [As always, click to enlarge].

It was like this for almost two miles on both banks.  Unbelievable.

This is more my speed:

* Karta is not an intern.

'cause there's no weak sauce in Alaska

So Josh came up for what's becoming an annual visit.  The snow was looking good and we decided to harvest some fresh corn.  We'll keep this light on the verbiage, and heavy on the pictures.  Enjoy!

Josh got in on Thursday; by Friday we were skinning up the local peaks under cloud cover . . .

. . . but the clouds didn't hang around for long.  Everything cleared up just as we made the final push.

From the top:

Too busy skiing to take pictures, you'll have to take our word that the down was every bit as fun as you might imagine.

Turning the page to Saturday, we worked our way up North to practice some flexible rod sampling.

Of course, they call it "fishing" and not "catching" for a reason.

With clear skies and a distinct lack of fish willing to take a (our) fly, it was back to the mountains.

Once again, the views were terrible . . .  looking West into Cook Inlet at low tide:

Putting away the skins for the down:

Austin taking a turn:

That wasn't so bad.

And Josh, pooped at the end of the day: