Dolly Varden.....great little charr
Well my favorite part of the fishing season here in Alaska arrived yesterday…it’s not catching those big old salmon or halibut…..but fishing for rainbows and dollies as they follow the salmon upstream to feast on their eggs. Spent the morning to early afternoon on a little creek which is not only chock full of sockeye and dollies but grizzly bears also. Started with an early morning drive down to the Kenai Peninsula (left at 2:30am) meeting with a couple of friends. We hopped in a boat and motored about 30 minutes up to one of the small tributaries…..unless you know where to look you would never spot it. The view of Mt. Illiamna traveling across the lake was spectacular:
We got to the mouth and it was guarded by the typical white-headed sentinel….you can see the eagles nest in the trees at the top of the hill:
The first 100 yards of tall grass and tree falls all over the creek discourage nearly everyone from investigating the fabulous waters above….of course, the numerous bears seem to have some small influence too. The river was choked with sockeye everywhere but they had just started to spawn. Within a few minutes we had the first beautiful dolly:
But then the next several holes produced nothing and we thought perhaps we were a week or two early for the dollies. But we persisted and managed to catch a few fish:
About this time we ran into the first of 3 bears….unfortunately I wasn’t able to get pictures of them before they ran off. But we found a few reds like this one who met his demise from some very large canines:
Despite not catching many fish it was hard to beat the absolutely gorgeous day and the great scenery along the creek:
Then one Cardell, one of the other guys started switching beads and found the magic one…so we all rerigged and started catching the fussy dollies everywhere. The four of us probably caught about 20 dollies each….it was great fun:
One of the last ones I kept for the dinner table, my wife loves the little beasts. We were flabbergasted after filleting it and discovering it was a female…it had a huge kype on the lower jaw and body coloring of a male:
Maybe it was just having some kind of politically correct gender issues. Anyway we hiked back to the boat and about 20 yards short of it I stumbled in the creek and went swimming up to my neck….50 degree water is dang cold when you waters are full of it. Also pulled a lower abdominal muscle and can hardly walk today…..didn’t think fishing was supposed to be this debilitating.
On the way home I stopped off at Quartz Creek, one of my favs, to see if the sockeye and dollies had made it up there yet. It only took a few minutes of fishing to find out:
The reds were thick and so were the dollies….probably caught 15 in the next few hours then finished driving home. A whole heckuva great day with the charrs.
Brian
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