Originally Posted August 17, 2004 by Chad
The travel brochure advertises Seldovia, Alaska as a quaint town of
300 friendly people and a few old crabs. I didn’t meet any crabs but
the rest of the locals seemed to keep to themselves. The bush pilot who
flew us back to Homer after our four days there asked us if we’d
enjoyed our time in Slow-dovia. He must have been referring to the food
service. I waited over an hour for my meal at least three times. One
night some people in our group were served, finished eating and had
their plates taken away before Mags and I ever got our meals. I would
have had enough time to run down to the burger joint to scarf down a few
and be back in time to sit long enough to work up an appetite again
before my meal arrived.
When wasn’t waiting for my meals I spent my time fishing. By
fishing, I mean rowing a borrowed wooden rowboat up and down the bay,
riding the tides and watching the otters.
I am not a great oarsman. I spent much of my time correcting and
over-correcting my course. I had little time to cast to the silver
salmon that were schooling in the bay in preparation for their final
journey upriver where they will spawn and die. After a couple of
attempts at rowing and fishing, I decided I’d like to do some catching.
I convinced Carl, my father-in-law, to come along and row for me early
the next morning. He wasn’t hard to convince.
Carl wasn’t any better at rowing than I was, but he did manage to get us all
the way up the bay to the mouth of the river. Like I said before, he’s
pretty fit for a man of 35. With him rowing, I could concentrate on
fishing. Unfortunately, this scheme didn’t improve the catching much. I
caught a rockfish and a couple of juvenile salmon on their way out to
the sea, but the ten pound silvers still weren’t interested in my
offerings.
After we left Seldolvia I had to fill my time with non-fishing
related activities such as hiking, glacier cruising and whale watching.
Friday’s edition of the Anchorage Daily News gave the sliver salmon
fishing in the Little Susitna River a five-star rating. Mike,
Margaret’s second cousin who served as our travel agent, tour guide and
outfitter (and sponsor!) said, “nothing ever gets five stars.” So he
set Carl, Mags and me up with inflatable kayaks, tents sleeping bags and
everything else we would and wouldn’t need for a four-day trip down the
river.
My fishing buddies will be happy to tell you about numerous fishing
trips I’ve been on where I haven’t done any catching. I’m fine with
that. If catching fish was easy it would be any fun. So spending four
days on a wild river filled with salmon was all I could ask for. I
admit that I fully expected to catch a fish, but I still would have been
happy if I didn’t.
The trip didn’t start out very well. I broke my fly rod while trying
to free my fly from a submerged log. I thought I might be able to
repair it but then I lost one of the pieces overboard while trying to
free myself from overhanging shrubbery. So I was resigned to fishing
with a spinning rod for the rest of the trip, which in my mind
immediately reduced the fishing from five to four stars.
So the quality of the fishing had declined, but later that evening
after we’d set up camp on a sandbar on the inside edge of an oxbow curve
the quality of the catching improved. Carl and I each caught our
limits of ten to fifteen pound salmon that day, and the catching was
steady from then on. This of course led to a corresponding increase in
fishing quality as the trip progressed. It was so good that even Mags
joined in on the fun. She caught a couple of feisty rainbow trout and
lost a salmon or two.
We ate salmon every day and filled our cooler with fillets to take
home. Then just three miles from our take out point on the river we
stopped for a final snack and rest. We had all filled our limits and
couldn’t legally do any more catching (well, at least not any keeping).
But I wasn’t finished fishing. I found a run in the river that I
thought had to hold fish. On my fifth cast I saw a red fish strike my
lure.
“One of those spawned-out sockeyes just took my lure,” I said. Then
the fish felt the tug of my line and I saw him roll away from me. He
was huge. My reel started buzzing with the sound of line being pulled
out against its will. I tightened my drag. The salmon rolled again,
this time doubling my rod over to where I thought it would snap. I
loosened my drag. I was using ten pound test line, and when the fish
rolled a third time I saw that he was easily two or three times that
weight.
By this time I realized that this wasn’t a spawned out sockeye, it
was a late arriving Chinook, or King salmon. He made sure I understood
this by leaping two or three feet out of the water a couple times. Then
he would dive deep to the bottom of the stream, taking more line from
my reel. I struggled to keep him within sight for the next twenty
minutes, but whenever I got him close enough for Mags to net him he
would make another run.
Then in a panic I handed the rod to Carl, took the net from Mags and
threw my shirt off. I thought I would just swim out there and net him
myself. That idea lasted about three seconds because he just swam
deeper into a swift moving section of the river. All I could do then
was just try to wear him out. It would be a battle of endurance. I was
glad I had just ridden nearly two thousand miles on a bicycle as
training for this contest.
The fish made a few more runs before he finally got tired. The first
time Mags got close enough to net him he saw her coming. He fought and
splashed, Mags squealed and they both ran away. That must have been
the last of his energy because a minute later Mags had regained her
composure enough to net him for good. She could barely lift him our to
the water.
Like I said, our cooler was full of fish, and this Chinook had been
out of the salt water long enough to turn a rosy pink color instead of
his bright shiny silver. So I only kept him out of the water long
enough to admire him some and take this picture.
I gently put the fish back in the water, rubbed his belly and pushed
water past his gills to revive him. He sat there exhausted for a few
seconds before disappearing back into the depths of the river. We all
sat there in awe. That was the most exciting thirty minutes of the
entire four-day trip. Probably the most exciting thirty minutes of
fishing I had ever had. At 38 inches long, it was certainly the biggest
fish I had ever caught. Just as Margaret and her father were getting
up to get back in their boats, I said, “you know, I still feel like
doing some more fishing.”
That is the difference between fishing and catching.
