Weekend #2 in Alaska.....
So after a very nice opening weekend in Alaska, my boss invites me out for a Friday fly-in to the Kuscatan River to see if any silvers are showing up yet. It was about a 90 minute flight and we flew with another friend, Dan, and his wife. We gear up and slop down the river in the mud for about half a mile to where a little clear creek runs into the off color glacial water of the Kuscatan. Last year we hit it the same weekend and only found a single silver. On the sandbar in front of the stream it becomes clear we are not the only one’s fishing this area…I affectionately call this the Bear Paw Festival:
Bob, my boss, is an extremely experienced bear hunter and with the paw prints being nearly 10 inches wide he estimated the sow at 91/2 to 10 feet….a very large brownie with a cub in tow. Just hoping we don’t have to jostle for position on the stream….you might notice Bob has his 50 cal Ruger holstered underneath one arm. I carried bear spray but the gun has a certain calming ambience in this situation.
We were casting spinners…..Vibrax and Mepps. The first 30 minutes it look like we missed again as the only fish we caught was Bob’s pink (humpy) salmon:
Since the silvers didn’t look to be home I changed to my lighter trout rod to work upstream where we normally catch dollies. But about the 3rd cast in the calm water I was hammered by a silver:
As the sun got a bit higher we could see 30 to 40 fresh silvers had just moved into the clear water in the stream. Wasn’t too much longer and another whacked my fire orange spinner.
This was highly entertaining fishing as my light rod and 10 lbs. braid was given quite a workout. I began to feel bad (not really but it is only polite to say so) as an hour into fishing I had caught 5 coho to 0 for the other three in our party. It was one of those times when the silvers seemed to be somewhat color selective and really liked mine. Also, to get a strike you had to work the spinner just as slow as possible to get the blade to spin…..it was fun being able to watch them creep up and inhale the spinner. Since everyone was donating their limit of 3 to me for the day, I started handing out some of my back-up supply of fire orange, then chartreuse spinners. Others started picking up silvers. Dan who was with us, is a retired regional Alaska Fish & Game officer……he kept us on the straight and narrow. His wife would fish for awhile then go to her photography…..this is a great composite picture she had of four consecutive photos during a coho jump….they get pretty high:
Bob decided to video another silver fight:
About this time Bob and Dan decided to start cheating (within the regulations) and went to fresh roe to catch some more fish. The indignity of it was they made me fillet out a couple of silvers for their fishing endeavours. You’ll notice in this vid the rather large bobber with bait Bob was using (I never lowered myself to using bait….at least not this time):
Still using artificials I managed another lightly colored buck….who just wasted me with mud while landing him:
We’d been fishing about 3 hours now and nearly everyone had hit their limit of 3:
Dan and his wife decided to walk back to their plane and leave then but Bob and I headed up the creek to catch some dollies. Waded up a couple hundred yards, with our eye out for big mama bear and her cub, and I nailed my first trout:
Of course all of us only show the “good” picture….here was my first attempt and getting a shot of this trout:
Not one of my best efforts. You’ll notice this is a rainbow…..in fishing this creek for many years Bob and I had never seen a rainbow up here before so this was a welcome little surprise. As it turned out we found nearly every trout up this creek was a rainbow today. Just strange as you virtually never catch one in the Kuscatan River either.
We caught a few dollies but the rainbows were the big hit. We managed to catch 18 to 20 in this size range in an hour. Bob caught another beauty up stream:
I had a really nice 20+ incher on that I hooked on the downstream side of a large, fallen tree. He immediately ran up underneath the log upstream, so I got a bit wet putting my rod under the tree and grabbing it again, only to find the miserable fish had run downstream again under the tree. Got my rod back under the tree, played him for a while in a large root patch in the river when he hung me up. I tried to tease him loose but he came off leaving my lure on a stump just enough out of reach that I couldn’t get it without going swimming. Don’t like swimming with the bears so I kissed it goodbye and we headed back to the airplane and off we went. Great time with good friends AND 35 lbs. of silver fillet to bring home.
Got some much needed sleep when I got back in and picked up my daughter at 5 am the next morning( proud of her, she was awake and ready to go) who was at a friends house visiting. We headed down to Quartz Creek for her first Alaska fishing experience. Why is it, when you leave your camera near one of your kids they have to pick it up and do selfies?? Notice she had her nails done for the fish…..I think she was planning on stabbing them.
We hit Quartz at about 0730. She has never fly fished so I hooked her up on a trout rod with a bobber and bead. There was a brief 10 minute instruction period then bang she was on with her first dolly about her 5th cast, she was jazzed:
She let the old man pop a few:
A bit later she thought she had tagged a monster but was sorely disappointed in what was hanging at the end of her line:
We were having a great time and she was just amazed at all the reds swimming around. She didn’t really develop the fishing bug until she was in college. We didn’t stop for too many pictures but I managed a fuzzy one of a double we hooked up:
Then I took a brief video of her trying to grab one in the water….very amusing:
One thing about this kid is she always has a great time and makes the most of the experience:
She had been great at not hooking any reds…..I was constantly cursing the reds as I had hooked several and had to retie leader many times. She finally hooked into a big buck sockeye and I coached her into getting it in. Quick pic and it swam away.
She started complaining about her arm hurting after that experience….it was good for her. We only saw a few larger dollies and this was the only one interested:
We’d gone nearly the whole day without a rainbow but one finally showed up:
All told I think we were in the neighborhood of 40-45 fish and she wasn’t too many behind the old man. As I took her back for a second circuit of this part of the river she said her feet were frozen and getting tired. Looked at the clock but it had only been 7 ½ hours since we started. But I decided to have pity on her and we waded back down to the car. Had to take her to the Summit House for a nice dinner (even though I’m sure we smelled rather fishy but that is common everywhere in Alaska). There is something just a bit more special when fishing with your kids…..I’m glad she had a great time.
Brian
