Fishing vs. Catching

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.