Alaska...

Here's a secret that I've never revealed: I didn't really catch this fish.

The truth is, I caught about 25 like it, but not this particular fish. This sometimes happens when you are the self-appointed photographer of the group. You end up getting fantastic shots of everyone else, but when you start putting your photo album together, you realize that you never had anyone get a picture of you, so you take what you can get. This was kind of a nice, scenic area, and I had just taken a picture of my friend, Chris--he insisted on taking my picture at the same time with the same fish, and it ended up being one of the only shots that came out good of me with a fish. It was a trip that I took to Alaska four years ago this week.

We had flown into Anchorage, and went straight to Wal-Mart to buy fishing licenses. I was with 2 guys that I didn't know very well, and we were joining a group of 10 other guys who were already in Kenai. It turns out that, even though we booked our trip as everyone had agreed, the other 10 guys had come in 2 days earlier and had all done a fly-out trip to a glacial lake where they caught lake trout, got swarmed by mosquitoes, and saw a brown bear across the lake--it sounded like a wonderful experience. When I found out that we had missed out on that experience, I was a little pissed off, but I got over it.

Leaving Anchorage for the drive to Kenai, we saw a gray fox run across the road in front of us. Anchorage felt like a small town compared to many of the large cities I have visited--rough and remote. During the summer, Alaska gets tons of daylight due to the tilt of the earth--even though it was 1:00 AM, outside it was still light, similar to a dusky evening sunset. As we wound our way through the mountains, it started to rain and the clouds rolling in covered the already-dim sun and night fell dark all around us while we were on the road.

We woke up at the gates of a state park in Southern Alaska, car windows fogged and stuffy, waiting to meet our buddies. We had driven through the rain and it was clear and there were now stars above us in a dizzying array all around. When the sun came up, I realized that we were in a panorama of beauty--down in a valley among steep mountains on all sides. I wanted to take a picture, but I guess I didn't know which way to point the camera--it was a feeling I had during the whole 10 days I was there--everything was scenic, everything breathtaking. Film couldn't possibly capture the grandiose nature of this view. We were on the Kenai peninsula in July, and it felt like heaven.



We fished the Russian river with our fly rods using flesh flies. These are wet flies that look a lot like the flesh from salmon which have already spawned or were eaten. The flesh breaks off and goes back downstream, and the other fish chow down...The rainbows were pretty aggressive and, before long, everyone had hooked one or two. Except Gavin--I'll have to get back to him later.

Our guide for the trip was Matt--Matt was a man of few words. He's one of those guys who is not a very good communicator, but thinks he is being very clear--as a result, I had a lot of misconceptions about our trip. For example, he told me over the phone, "We're hiking in when you get here--expect it to be about 5 miles or so." So I scaled down my clothes and toiletries and everything because I thought I was carrying everything for 5 miles. What he really meant is that we were going to get situated in our campsite and then hike along the river for 5 miles (lie!: it was about 8 miles and took all day). Matt was a fishing guru--he was absolutely insane about fishing and was a master.

But misdirection didn't keep me from being stupid on my own--I brought along a large, green backpack that I bought from Orvis. Here's how I was stupid: Orvis charges way too much for said backpack, and I didn't need a backpack in the first place. Additionally, my buddies felt very lucky to be able to give me crap to cram into my backpack to keep dry, since I was the only moron who brought one (I wanted to keep my stuff dry). Pretty soon, my pack was bulging--I had to draw the line at Gavin asking me to put his shoes in my bag, though, to which he responded by whining.

Turns out that Gavin was our token pain-in-the-ass on the trip--probably the reason that they covertly scheduled the fly-out day before our group arrived. Matt nicely described him as "low energy", which I later learned was just his nice way of saying lazy, cheap, whining bastard who actually doesn't like fishing but didn't want to be left out of the fishing trip (!). So I, being the newest member of the group (some of them had known each other for 10-15 years), initially got stuck babysitting Gavin (right up to where I unstuck myself by telling him to piss off). About 5'8" with dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and an impeccably trimmed beard, Gavin was really dependent on his wife for managing any hassles in his life--she had seen him off at the airport and told my wife that she was really worried about how he was going to do on his own.

He liked to brag about how smart he was and how great it was that he had an easy job where he didn't have to work too hard--he was a systems operator for a school district. Every time we paid for anything on the trip (like gas for the trucks or boats we were using), he would shove his hand in his pockets and look the other way. Even when we would pay for our own meals, if we had someone run to go get burgers or something, he would try to pay a dollar short. I don't normally notice stuff like that, but with Gavin you couldn't help but notice. Even when I got fed up and said something, it rolled off his back and he didn't pay attention to it.

During our hike along the Russian, he got overconfident and got ahead of me (I was trying to relax in the beautiful scenery and he wanted to talk about computers or something). Gavin had seen me catch the first fish and had wanted to get ahead of me, complaining that I was fishing the holes out before he got to them--he didn't catch a fish all day and started losing his cool and getting very impatient, casting heavily a couple of times into each hole, not letting his fly float cleanly into it, and abruptly moving on. Then I would come behind him, catching a few along the way, which would just make him go nuts.



The embankment got steeper and steeper--sometimes we had to climb a trail up the side of a hill 30 or 40 feet--in our waders and carrying our rods carefully. My green backpack started to feel ridiculously heavy and bulky--I started joking to myself that it was like Luke carrying Yoda on his shoulders through the Degobah swamp in The Empire Strikes Back, so I nicknamed my backpack Yoda--somehow, and I know this is hard to believe, nobody else thought that was funny whatsoever when I told them the joke later, which made me kind of sad.

So Gavin fell face-first into the freezing cold Russian river and water started flowing into his waders. He was about 100 yards ahead of me, and I had waded out to get a good angle under some trees, so there was no way I was going to be able to wade out, hike down the trail, and save him--it would have taken about 5 minutes. Gavin spit and sputtered for about 30 seconds until he got his balance again, then stood up, totally soaked from head to toe.

He started screaming at me, asking why in the world didn't I rush over to help him out. I told him, "I was here downstream, dude--somebody had to snag the body when it finally floated over here!" (thinking: if I was near you I would have thrown a rock on top of you!). He was still excited about his near-death experience and mad from not catching fish and his whole Alaska experience wasn't going as he had hoped with him being the Grizzly Adams hero he had envisioned himself to be. It was now getting hot and dry so I wasn't too worried about him getting hypothermia but I didn't say anything to put it into his mind (he wasn't a camper, so it didn't occur to him to be worried about it). We hiked along a little faster to keep his body temperature higher for a while till he dried out.

That night I got my first taste of salmon fishing on the Kenai--it was fantastic! The funny part is that the salmon really don't "bite" your fly--you rig it to bounce along the bottom of the river at the level where their mouth is, then you are pretty much snagging them in the lip as they instinctively close their mouth. They aren't feeding at all--they are swimming upstream to spawn and die. They start out at the mouth of the river to be very silver and shiny, and as they use up their energy swimming against the current, they get this reddish hue with a green head--so you can see we were quite upriver when we caught this one. If you have polarized glasses, you can see them swimming along the banks of the river, stopping in certain eddies to rest before moving along further upstream.



I caught five fish--my limit for the day, and looked up--it looked like noon but it was midnight--now this was my kind of daylight hours! One guy in our group, Brian, fished all 10 days (he came in early so it was actually 12 days)--pretty much dawn to dusk. It was unbelievable, and I applaud him for his stamina and enthusiasm, because I got tired of fishing (!) about halfway into it and had to take a break for a day.

The 20 hours or so of daylight was throwing me off--I started to sleep only a couple of hours a night and eat only once or so a day--sometimes we would snack on dry smoked salmon prepared in a smoker with brown sugar and soy sauce--it was sliced into sticks and we would eat them with cheddar cheese--my gosh it was good! I grew my beard out during the whole trip (confession--I knew I was going to do this and started a couple of days early to further dramatize the effect when I got back.)

The next day when we went out to go salmon fishing again, I was having a terrible time catching anything and started to get frustrated. It took me about 2 hours to figure out that we had moved to the other side of the river, and I had gotten really used to the casting movements from right to left, and I was having a really hard time throwing left to right and getting a feel for the bite coming the opposite direction--it took me about 4 hours before I caught my first fish. Then I got on a roll and almost had my limit, but my friend's dad had put all the fish into a huge net and just laid the net on the bank. Gavin, who had miraculously caught a fish, didn't put the net back all the way the net mouth dipped into the water--we lost 10 fish out of it before someone figured it out.

So, we sat there for another 2 hours and caught another limit of fish to take back with us! I had mine flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen and FedExed home--Fran cooked them when I got back and they were fantastic!

The next day we tried, unsuccessfully, to troll down the middle of the river for king salmon--we saw lots of bear and moose tracks, but I never ran into either one of these on foot while fishing. I saw lots of moose from the car---I even saw one in town near Wal-Mart when we were getting supplies.

On my birthday, I had an adventure on my own--I went on a halibut charter out in the ocean where we fished off the Barren Islands (about halfway to Kodiak from Homer). Originally, three of us were supposed to go, but the other two guys changed their minds the night before. So I got up at about 3:00 AM and drove myself to meet the charter at 6:00. At 3:00 the moon was low in the sky and I'll never forget the deep indigo sky that wasn't quite completely dark and black like the midnight sky home in Texas. Driving to Homer, I had to be very careful because there were moose everywhere along the side of the road--I saw several huge bulls grazing right by the side of the road as I drove along. I flipped on the radio to hear the news and weather, and my sister Melanie, who is a news radio anchor, was giving a report. Her news show was syndicated in Alaska! Who knew? My worlds collided a little, because I felt that I was all by myself, having seen no cars or signs of human life for about an hour--in a way it was disappointing that I could turn on the radio and hear my sister--like I hadn't tried hard enough to get away from home...

The boat was small, and there were about eight of us in the party--the other guys were pretty cool, and we all had a good time. I caught the first fish, and the most, but not the largest--my biggest fish was about 35 pounds, which was nice but not huge as far as halibut go--the biggest of the boat was about 50 lbs for the day, but we were all hoping for a one hundred pounder at least. The tide movement was the largest of the year--22 feet! This had an effect on our fishing as we were fishing at the bottom off the islands. We had lucked out and gotten the lead captain for the charter company, so he took us around and we had the best day by far of any of the boats--when we went back in at the end of the day, the other guys were watching us unload our fish and eyeing our catch.



On the last day of the trip, three of us rafted back down the Kenai, float fishing and trolling for trout along the way. I hooked my largest trout of the trip that afternoon as we pulled into the shallows, and I hopped out of the raft and fought him to the gravel bank. He was a 20-inch rainbow and beautifully colored--I was just blown away--it was a perfect climax to the trip.


When we put the raft in near the truck, I saw a moose swimming across the river, fighting the current to get to shore. A bald eagle soared overhead. The day was bright and clear. I climed to the top of a cliff and looked out over the mountain range in the distance, the red fire weed in front of me, and I realized that I would always have a spot in my heart for Alaska.