Hanging Around Soldotna!

The definition of insanity (or is it stupidity?) is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. These words echo in my head as I am on my 6^th hour of casting into the Kenai River without a single fish. It was Monday and we had parked ourselves at the Donald E. Gilman Kenai River Center for the day. The goal was to have a down day to get Barb healthy and back on her feet. 

“I am going to walk down by the river and see if anyone is fishing”, I tell Barb as she lays in bed with the chills. It is still a week or two early for the big salmon runs on this river, but perhaps there are a few early arrivers that need to be flossed. 

There are very nice walkways and stairs down to the river. 

Arriving at the river I see two fishermen, one is just leaving, and I ask him how he did. “Had two on, lost them both”. Well, that is not encouraging. I stroll down to the other fisherman and see that he has three on the stringer. As I approach, he catches another one that gets off after a couple of jumps that would have made the Flying Wallendas proud. 

We chat for a little bit, and I decide that I could either watch Barb sleep or go fishing. As much fun as it is to watch Barb sleep, I decide to get all my stuff together and go fishing. 20 minutes later I am back at the water just as that fisherman catches his 6^th fish. I start tossing my line flipping and flossing as he cleans his fish at one of the table provided. He then asks if I can watch his stuff while he goes and puts his fish in the freezer. I continue flipping. While he is gone I made friends with this duck who stopped by to see what I was up to. 

An hour later he returns and starts fishing again. Now being uncertain if one can fish in Alaska after already catching a limit of fish. I raise an internal eyebrow and carry on with my flipping. Soon enough he has another one that he lands, and another one, and another one. By now I have been flipping for 3 flipping hours without so much as a hit! I move my weights up and down my leader, I cast further out, I cast closer in, I change my leader, I sharpen my hook, I change the amount of weight I have on my line. Nothing seems to be working. By now several other fishermen have arrived and although action is not hot and heavy a few of them are hooking into fish. I am getting VERY frustrated. 4 hours into my journey to hell Barb shows up with the girls. Notice that Dakota wants nothing to do with those stairs! A little while later she got a little braver.

She watches me for a bit and leave. She comes back in 20 minutes, pole in hand, wearing her waders.  “Probably not the wisest decision seeing how you're not feeling well”, I say. “I married you, didn’t I?”, she responds. I am not sure how to take that response and continue fishing. 

She stands next to me and within 15 minutes hooks one! It got off, but the pissedoffness in me goes through the roof! I caught fish in the Kasilof, why could I not catch one here?!?!

After 30 minutes she decides that coming out fishing was not a good idea as she has the chills again. I fish a little while longer before admitting defeat for the day (I am a slow learner) and head to the truck. 

Tomorrow comes, different day, same result. Then some lady starts talking to me, asking me where I am from.... if I have caught anything. Nope. She says, “Go stand by my husband, he’ll help you”. It just so happens that I saw this guy catch three fish the day before, so I know he knows what he is going. I trudge over there and meet her husband (who I later find out is Steve) and he says, “Let me look at your set up”. He looks it over and says, “Looks good to me, you must just suck as a fisherman”. Okay, he didn’t really say that last part, but it would not have surprised me at that point. Then he looks closer and says, “Why son, you have the wrong knot on your hook!” “You’ve got an improved clinch knot, you need to tie a snell knot on that hook, they spin in the water and hook the fish. Clinch knots don’t spin”.

 Although he is probably 10 years older than me, I feel like am 8-year-old as he takes my line, cuts it and adeptly ties a snell knot on my hook in about 10 seconds. “Try that”, he says. I try it and by God I had a fish on in like 5 minutes! I only had it on for 2 seconds, but it was on! Maybe there is hope for me after all!

 We fish together for 30 minutes before he has to go, he caught 2 in that 30 minutes and left me to carry on. I slide over into his spot and hook one before he is to the shore, but again it got off. An hour later I am back at the camper for supper, fishless, but with renewed hope. It’s 8pm by the time we are done with dinner and I tell Barb, “I’m going out until 10.”. 

As I approach the water, there is a younger couple (40’s) fishing and I ask them if they caught anything. “Nothing” is their response. I head over to Steve’s spot and on my third cast, I hook one. Please God, please God, let me land this fish. I grab the net and fight it, upriver, down river, I play this fish finally getting it close enough that maybe I can net it and it swims right into the net! I actually think even God felt sorry for me and sent me this fish! 

I put the fish on the stringer and notice the other couple is leaving. Barb shows up a few minutes later and says, “I just passed a couple who said a guy just showed up and caught one almost immediately”. “That as me!” I tell her, holding up my fish, I was finally THAT guy!  

The next morning, I got up at 5am went out for an hour. What a beautiful morning. As I am standing there, I look up and standing in front of me is a cow moose with a little tiny calf 40 yards aways from me. Just the other side of the dock in the picture below. No fish, but at that point I did not care. 

Later that day, we headed back to Ninilchik to have supper with Rich and Susan. I forgot to mention, last time we were at their house Barb and Susan did some stained glass while Rich and I were fishing. Susan is really skilled. Here is some of her work....

So, she and Barb set about teaching Barb how to do it. They went through different patterns and came with this mountain.

We are still a week or so away from the really from the salmon really starting to run. We need the counts to get into the 30,000-100,000 fish per day not these 5,000-6,000 we are seeing now.  

We'll continue to wait for numbers to increase, in the meantime we have another adventure planned later this week to visit some friends in the area!