I'm Back!

Well, I finally returned from the great state of Alaska no worse for the wear! For me Alaska is a place were fishing is the priority and sleep is an option. As stated in an earlier post, I had the pleasure of traveling with my brother Steve, and first cousins (all on my dad's side) Paul, Greg, and Mark. Besides being family, these guys are the greatest in the world, putting up with me for 8 days was punishment enough. We landed in Anchorage about noon on Thursday August 14th. Greg flew Suncountry and arrived 2 hours ahead of us so he met up with my cousin Mark, who lives in Anchorage. Their job was to get a hitch for the rental car which we were not suppose to do as well get a landing net. We arrived and began the adventure. Mark is a retired Army guy and he was able to rent us a boat from the base to use on the Kenai for $350/week. This was incredible so we picked it up and headed for Soldotna. There we dropped the boat off at a friends until we returned on Sunday. One of the things we bring to Alaska is fresh sweet corn. This is like gold to our friends and we know they appreciate it. After dropping off about 5 dozen ears we headed to Seward, our destination for the next 3 nights. Seward is located at the south end of the Kenai Pennisula and is an important place for tourism, fishing, and cargo port with a major coal transfer facility there. Our plan was to do 2 full days with Neil Marlow aboard the Shearwater searching for halibut, lingcod, rockfish, and silver salmon. Friday proved to be the best silver day and we did real well including this 15 pounder that you see me holding. In the ocean the salmon are schooled up chasing bait fish, getting ready to head up the local rivers to spawn. Our strategy was to fish the bays that had rivers flowing into them. We fished with 5 oz chain bead sinkers with a 2 foot leader attached to a hook and a squid attractor. A chunk of herring was all it took. We fished the rockfish the same way. Rockfish have swim bladders so when you pull them out of 100 feet they are pretty well done. Besides our 3 salmon and 4 rockfish per day, we were hoping to get at least 2 25# halibut per day. This would give each of us 50# of meat to take home. Unfortunately we were only able to catch about 30 pounds each for the 2 days. Well, that's fishing! On Sunday we returned to the Kenai for the peak of the early silver salmon run. Because it is an even year, the pinks were in and this is a tremendous understatment. In future posts I will elaborate on this incredible event in nature.

My previous post mentioned bears. On Tuesday we flew out of the Funny River Airport in Soldotna to the north side of Cook Inlet and a landed on the beach at the Polly Creek outlet. Here was our "Alaskan Wilderness" experience. The pilot dropped us off at 9:00AM and vowed to return about 8:30 that evening. Upon leaving he gave us each a hand held flare and told us if we run into a bear that was aggresive, wait till it's about 10 feet from you them pull the flare cord. Yeah, right! At about 4:00 the bears showed up, a sow and her 3 cubs of which 2 were second year cubs and pretty big. It was exciting to see as the appeared across the river which initially gave us a physical barrier, which we soon saw it made no difference. While watching momma, one of the older cubs suddenly appeared on our side, barreling full bore towards us. The last thing we wanted was to be in the middle of the sow and her cub. A little noise and the cub headed across the river to mom. Although relieved, it was a tense but exciting moment.

I have many pictures to sort out and many stories to tell, too much for one setting. I will post a number of our more interesting adventures in the coming weeks as I hope my sharing of this experience will encourage you to at least make the same trip. You will never be the same.