Alaska Pictures

Picture #25 has me a little concerned. Did you guys enlist?

Hey Charlie! We were talking about your AK trip because we didn't
catch a single Pink. They got that plane from a museum and it was
apparently an Army plane at one time. It's a pretty distinctive paint
job. Boris the Russian pilot is very cool and he remembered Tom
Nakashima. I asked Boris what one of the buttons was for and he said
"Eject".

Jeff, let's see... It was the best because I've never been to Alaska
before, never caught 7 Grayling in 7 casts before, in fact never a
single one, ever. I've also never camped for 12 days before,
especially without any contact with the outside world. Oh yeah, the
float plane trip and the landing on the tiny lake was pretty cool too.

In fact, before this trip I'd never caught a Char or a Silver Salmon
either.

We laughed pretty hard when my tent blew into the water and I had to
wade nearly to the tops of my waders to get it back in the still water.
Most of the other laughs were at my expense too!

We saw huge bear tracks and half eaten King salmon everywhere, but no
bears. I've never been anywhere else in Alaska, but I think I prefer
the areas where bears get hunted. Very few people float that river
every year and a large percentage are hunters. We were glad we didn't
waste our time with a gun and none of us probably had any idea where
the bear spray was.

We had great weather and a variety of weather. Lots of cloudy and
cool, but we had maybe 3 bluebird days, one freezing night, and a few
rainy days and nights too. I think there were only 2 nights where we
had to seriously hunker down and a third where the rain interfered with
our grilling salmon.

It's a lot of work loading and unloading the boats every day, setting
up a kitchen and all of our tents. Cooking and cleaning. Loading back
up in the morning and rowing down the river. We didn't have any
pepper. Bring pepper if you go. Bring lotion for your hands too. The
fishing was really good and our hands all got pretty seriously chapped.
Me personally, I had a hard time tightening knots by about day 8 or 9
because the line would cut my weakened skin. It took me a while to
figure out that I was also getting some good little cuts from the teeth
on the big red male Silvers. RW did not have the problem. Willi had
like 7 cuts per finger.

Fishing wise, we loved the Silvers and they loved heavy purple or
charteruese Bubba Bugger type patterns (thanks Andy Wade). Don't try
to say Bubba Bugger if you've quit fishing and started drinking. Danl
caught salmon pretty easily with clousers too and a simple black or
purple bunny fur leech with dumbells also worked fine for me, most of
the time. Danl was also the rainbow king - he spent lots of time
seeking the rainbows while the four of us combat fished a salmon hole.
We'd have triples where there was enough room. We could have probably
hooked 4 or maybe even 5 at once at times but we didn't want to look
too greedy (G). It wasn't hand over fist except for 20-30 minute
stretches in some of the better holding areas. We only camped two
consecutive nights at the same place once and that campsite featured
amazing Silver fishing. Willi caught the big rainbow, measured to 24
inches. That part of Alaska is not gigantic rainbow country. Willi
also caught a bunch of Silvers with his 5 weight until he finally broke
it. We did use 7s for most of the Silver fishing.

Bevin and I took a bad wrong turn in some braids and ended up walking,
then "swimming" the boat through an incredible combination of swift
deep water and large trees completely obscuring the channel we were in.
We were lucky and the one rod we broke has a warranty and we had a
backup in the boat.

The trip there was pretty crazy - Bevin and I were in a plane that sat
on the runway in ABQ for 2 hours, causing us to miss our Denver to
Anchorage AND our Anchorage to Bethel. We were all booked on different
flights to Bethel but we all ended up on the same plane, the last one
that would get us there to fly out with the maximum number of days.

We had a blast. Can't wait to do it again, but it might be awhile.

bruce h