Fishing - Off to the Mountains

"Jonathan Cook" wrote:
OBROFF: still working on AK pictures. Before I went I mentioned
that I wanted to catch pink salmon. Well on the Kenai peninsula
all the runs were off schedule, and there were none. In Seward
and Valdez all the freshwater draingages are closed to fishing,
but in Valdez there was a nice beach you could fish. I went out
there our last morning in AK, and there were pinks all over. In
about 10 casts I had reeled in four, but two had been tail or
back hooked. I was sure that they were going after my fly but
they were so thick that a long, elegant cast (as elegant as _I_
can cast, that is) was just coming back over too many fish.
So I put on a visible fly (small fushia bunny leech), and started
sight fishing close ones. After that all my hookups were in or
near the mouth, as I could see them hit the fly. I did this for
another 1/2 hour but it really wasn't much fun after that. It
was ridiculously easy, and to be honest they didn't fight much.
I was using my standard 5wt I use at the San Juan, but a SJ
trout 2/3 their size would fight better. Maybe that's unfair
because I was using 3x leader, as opposed to 5x/6x on the SJ,
but well, I wasn't impressed.

When were you up there? I just got back last week, we stayed at Mcdougal
and fished the Lake Creek tributary of the Yentna River (about 60 miles N/W
of Anchorage). The fishing for silvers was superb; the king season was
closed, but we still managed to hook five to ten each day. The pinks were so
thick and we foul hooked them so frequently that we had to seek out spots
where there weren't as many of them. Even when you hooked a pink fairly, the
only had 1/10th the fight of a silver, and a silver had about a tenth the
fight of a king.The only run that was off were the sockeyes; the authorities
did an emergency season closure the week prior to our arrival due to low
fish counts. I started fishing on day one with a 5wt Sage, after hooking my
first silver I switched to a 9wt, just for the comfort of the fighting butt.