Trifecta 2.0

Change -- the essential process of all existence.

So said a profound Mr. Spock in "Let that be your Last Battlefield," and so too says Pit Boss after completing, at long last, a Trifecta for 2011. Rituals like the Pit Trifecta reassure us and comfort us, letting us pretend that today, which starts with hot coffee just like any other day, is not going to be too different from yesterday, letting us pretend that 2011 is just the same as 2001 and all the things we love and enjoy are going to remain the same for us until we never, ever die.

Now that I am just about "old," I am well aware of how true that statement is. I didn't even need to drive up what used to be the bumpy, muddy old dirt middle of the Hagen Flat road, getting myself mentally ready to settle into my favorite old renegade camp next to the abandoned mine entrance, and instead see this:

Yep -- right there where the famous Pit River Bar used to be, there is now a big brown "Fee Area" sign. Just at the moment, there's no fee and no one else camping there, so on Saturday night it was just me and the spanking brand new iron fire rings and sturdy new picnic tables, plus the familiar and sweet sound the river makes going through that part of the canyon. But soon, will it be full of boisterous families and big RV's with their generators running all night, and picnic plates and cigarette smoke blowing in the breeze?

I wonder. I have been down this trail many times. It used to be very hard to describe to people how to find the access and get down to the river. That problem is "solved." It also used to be some of the toughest, most physically challenging wading in a river famous for being difficult, and Pit Boss has (yes it is true) taken a swim or two down there. And now, with the increased flows, is it going to be easier? Hm. Might want to add a third little cartoon showing little kids getting swept downstream in the current to drown under a strainer? I'm just saying.

The road was graded smooth and driving in the canyon was way too easy, and it looks like they are going to pave it. As far as I could tell, it's safe to ignore the "Road Closed" signs on Pit 5 and head on up all the way to #3 (I did, of course, catching trout in each reach and making it an official Trifecta). It occurred to me that they're just trying to do on Hagen Flat Road what they did on the North Fork of the Feather, where there are plenty of nice clean campgrounds and access areas.

There's a reason why I never ran for Feather Boss, though. The Pit is (was) my kind of place: steep, wild, overgrown and difficult enough that few people wanted to fish there despite a fine, fine population of wild trout. I liked it that there were no trail signs nor campgrounds nor rangers, and if the price you pay for that is to wake up on the morning of Opening Day to the sound of shotgun blasts and an idiot yelling "Yeah! Yeah!" (and laughing at how stupid the guy sounded) or driving late into a dark Pit 4 renegade camp and finding a largish drinking party of Burney dropouts, led by a thin bespectacled man holding a tiny dog and wearing nothing but a grass skirt (and laughing even harder -- Mike Hadj will remember both these crackups), well, that was the price and I was happy to pay it.

Boy oh boy has it changed. A little piece of my heart goes brittle and breaks off when I see two cars parked by my "secret" access point on #5 (PB always drove his truck back off the main road where it couldn't be seen), or when I see those little cartoon fishers on a sign where you used to see nothing but pines and poison oak. But then again, every time I get a little love from my old friends, still swimming fine under the increased flows, a healing process takes place:

Maine State Micropterizing

A few days ago I learned an excellent new word: Micropterus. It sounds lovely and looks cool in Verdana font, and it refers to a couple of my favorite feeshies, the largemouth (micropterus salmoides) and smallmouth (micropterus dolomieu) bass. Texas salmoides got some free publicity here back in April, and now I would like to say a few words about Maine state dolomieu and some related species. Without further adieu, here is a specimen of dolomieu:

Many of my trips back to my hometown in Maine have started off with a simple ritual where I show up at my parents' house, give them a hug during which I pickpocket their car keys, and then drive off to go bass fishing in one of my favorite old ponds. This time I was a little more polite than that, partly because I wanted to spend some quality time with the folks, and partly because a flight that arrives in Trenton at 3:30 really doesn't allow enough time to put together a kayak and get staged up for fishing. I did in fact fish every other night of the trip, three times yakking and twice in my old canoe with my buddy Stroutster, who has become the Custodian of the Canoe. This canoe:

That picture was taken just last night during a really fun trip to a little pond that the Custodian and I have been fishing for (jeezus!) over 30 years now. Miraculously, it still fishes well, despite certain observations made by a grumpy old feller who owns one of the few little cabins on the north shore . . . you see, he told us by way of a greeting, "there ain't any fish in this pond." Suggesting perhaps we might go elsewhere, sir? Good luck with that one. The truest fortune cookie I ever got at China Hill said, "You are a person who loves to do what people say can't be done."

So we made a point to hoot and holler as loud as could be when I had a bass jumping around on the line before the clock even struck five. A plan was mooted (and quickly tabled) to leave that old feller a nice big pickerel on his doorstep when we left. We are immature, yes, but not quite that bad anymore.

Stroutster is an old-school bait man and hardware-flinger, but it turns out that he had never taken a fish on a topwater lure before last night. After watching me catch a couple bass on poppers and hook pickerel (esox niger) right and left with the same fly (with the pickerel tracking it in their cool way with a little wake, and then slashing at it their unsubtle, adrenaline-splashing manner), Stroutser switched to a hula popper he had in the tackle box. Cast cast cast -- but that was not the popper destined to pop a man's topwater cherry. No strikes. When it became clear they didn't want to hula, we instead tied on a zara spook and verified an important fact: they love that weird shit. Witness:

I really wanted to get the strike on camera, but a few leaps will have to do:

The air was already getting decidedly autumn-like in Maine over the past week, making for lovely cool conditions and magical late dusks with lots of vapor rolling off the surface of the water as you paddle back to the launch under headlamp light. Fortunately, the water (which of course has higher thermal inertia than atmospheric air, as we all appreciate) was still warm enough that topwater was ON. I took a few greenish balsa poppers with weed guards, fished them 90% of the time, and brought them back today with literally no paint left on them. That's how Maine State Micropertizing should be, I figure.

Alagnak Skies

You know what's a good way to look at photos of the sky? Put them in a fancy Mac screensaver that changes the focus and pans around on them! It's the next best thing to sitting in a camp chair under big open skies and occasionally getting up to do astounded 36o's:

Since few people in their right minds are ever going to find themselves camping on a gravel bar in the lower Alagnak river in August, I'll go ahead and make a Picasaweb album of photos of such skies. Here are a few of my favorites from the last trip right here inline though:

That was my last morning on the river, and it started very beautifully at around 42 degrees.

This one I like because it reminds me of the train of storm clouds that Saruman conjured up to stop the Fellowship on Caradhras the Cruel . . . maybe the old coot was standing over Bristol Bay right then chanting, "Ahni, mani, padma, hah!" or whatever the cloud spell is:

For me, there's something magical about the sky over a big flat expanse of tundra:

And there's always something special about the last bit of sun break in a deepening sky:

And there's the moon:

in beginning corners dawn smirks

and there's the moon,thinner than a watchspring

(Poem XIV of ViVa by E. E. Cummings)

Two Halves

You know how your favorite cliche-wielding soccer commentators like to point out that it is "a game of two halves," as though that were the most profound observation they ever made? They seem to pull that one out when they are looking at a first-half result that goes against the run of play, or maybe one of those grim scoreless affairs, and they hope or expect that things will change in the second half.

My Alagnak float last month was kind of like that. Fat with cohos in the lower river, it was pretty darn quiet in the upper river. Conventional reason says that all the big rainbows probably followed the sockeye migration all the way to Moraine Creek. I was willing enough to go join the mayhem of guided parties and bear-gawkers up there, but was unable to land due to a complete white-out; and by the time we flew back to the Kukaklek outlet, it was too bumpy with three-foot waves for landing at the outlet proper. I got put down in an unideal spot, and found myself deeply baffled by travelling TWO WHOLE MILES downstream without a SINGLE STRIKE:




A little later the pressure started to ease up with the odd rainbow and good numbers of grayling. In fact, the little island where I camped on nights 1 & 2, had a handful of prime riffles on its four corners that predictably yielded a few grayling per hour, as long as I rested them properly between sessions. This was good, as I lacked the spirit to break camp and head downstream during a 28 HOUR stretch of UNCEASING RAIN, and instead just hunkered down with my pretty grayling friends:


















This was pretty far from the worst of outcomes, since a big part of what I was seeking from the upper river was solitude in the wilderness. Into my third day the weather cleared, and I found myself catching grayling and char and even whitefish, and just kind of basically joyfully playing around in a big old river and wide-open landscape that allowed me to imagine that I was the only human left alive.




Solitude is very cool, but so are certain encounters with humans. Imagine spending a very quiet couple of hours on a gravel bar in a remote river, cooking up some ramen and coffee and drying some of your stuff off, and then, just as you are getting ready to leave and even talking to yourself a little, you hear a voice calling out, "is that ERIC???" Whoah -- "is this a hallucination?" is the first thing that flashes through my mind. Not for the last time I reflect that maybe eating those special ones with the little whales printed on them back in high school wasn't such a good idea. But no-- lo and behold, it is Dan Cole, originally of Maine and now of LA, and his high school music teacher Darrell, also from Maine (and with a real accent), moving downstream in a CANOE!!!


One of Dan's many distinctions is that he is the sole witness to my legendary Brooks River Mousing session, the night I caught double digits of big bows on a Moorish mouse but had no living camera handy to prove it. And here's the dude showing up out of nowhere on the Kukaklek branch of the Alagnak! Small world indeed.

Though actually, I should have known or at least suspected. Knowing that Dan is also a portable boat guy who has no problem dealing with Alaskan conditions, I actually hit him up earlier this winter as a possible partner on a Meshik River float. But he told me he already had a trip planned with a pal from back East, and I filed it away as a no-op, as they say in software.

Long story short, I had some really great company for about twenty hours. We went through the rapids together, and if you thought maybe a sleek, longish canoe might have some trouble making the hard left out of the big eddy, then you'd be right:


While my temporary float partners bailed, I put the 6wt back together and started officially fishing the lower upper Kukaklek. It was almost entirely more ten-inch juveniles until I hit this one and gave the boys some good entertainment in the form of a demonstration of the desperate art of paddling yourself to shore with one arm while holding a fly rod high in the air with the other while a strong fish jumps and runs circles around your blow-up boat. (Note the clown suit, which doubles as backup waders and which seem better for going through rapids where you might end up swimming.)


As soon as we got to the confluence camp where the Kukaklek and Nonvianuk branches come together, the skies opened up with a real drencher. No matter -- we set up one of my tarps and had an awesome scotch tasting: my precious 18 year Macallan and two types of Ardbeg single malt from Dan, including the incomparable Uigeadail. Holy shit that is a drink -- peaty like Laphroig but with lots of the same sweet, syrupy flavors as the Macallan, and a burning finish that lets you know you are alive! It immediately got promoted to my top 3 and a bottle now resides in my cabinet, thank you very much Dan. In exchange for this, I guess it was worth watching you and Darrell drink half my ten day's supply of Macallen in twenty minutes' time . . .

Oh also, I should compliment Dan on some excellent work starting a fire with the completely soaked fuel available that evening. Darrell contributed some soaked Cohglan's firesticks, I contributed about 75 pages of Edith Wharton, and then some guys we have never seen before and would never recognize, ever, because they were definitely (for the record) not ourselves, stopped by to throw a funny sign in the fire:


Does that funny sign say "No Trespassing?" Huh. That would be weird. It would almost be like somebody thought they could put up a sign in the middle of Katmai and expect people not to camp in the area. Good luck with that one.

After parting with the boys, who had a much faster boat and only two days left before their pickup vs. my five full days, my float resumed its calm pace. I started seeing a few bears, and I am sad to report that one of them was no longer alive. This poor gal (a sow) was washed up in the shallows with a bad case of rigor mortis, bleeding from her nose. I now share a distinction with Timothy Treadwell -- I have touched a bear with my bare hands -- but for all my poking around I could not find a bullet hole or any sign of foul play. It took all my scant good sense to not pull out my river knife and take a claw for a necklace:


I said a little non-verbal Bear Prayer for her and moved on. The good news is that there was no shortage of living cohorts around:

• A mom and cub on the bank just downstream from this funeral scene (quite possibly they ended up eating some of her).
• A big-tracked fellow that visited my tent one night, sniffing very loudly and taking off with a loud growl when I said, "not too close boss!" while clutching my mace can in the sleeping bag, heart REALLY racing.
  
• A shyer guy who, perhaps somewhat indignantly, recovered a rotting chum salmon carcass from the shallows where I had thrown it and restored it to its place on the bank about 50 feet from my camp -- perhaps having a nice cheesey nibble or two as well.
  

Oddly enough, I recovered my lost 2010 Brooks Camp bear pin in the tundra at that camp, and stuck it up on a tree where it could help my bear friends scratch their many itches:


At the camp where I got so aggressively sniffed in the dark wee hours, I confess I was being a Bad Boy. Almost always, I follow proper bear-safe protocol to the letter. Being a solo guy who inevitable ends up with some fish odor on self and boat, this is pretty important. But on this particular occasion, I just absitively posolultely could not tear myself away from a little creek swirling with cohos -- the first place where I caught a nice fresh silver one -- and so ended up camping on a tiny, muddy strip which was too close to the riverbank, too close to my food cache, and too close also to a wolf highway. After the bear woke me and almost caused me to pee in my tent, I lay awake and listened to the wolves howl; first one haunting, descending voice; then another one or two join it; then more . . . and I am here to tell you that that is one HEAVY chord to sit and listen to alone in the wild.

Katalog of Kohos

Hay! I kot some cohos on the good old Alagnak.

They wuz way down low on the river, below the brayds. But eventually I found em at the Tin Shack:




Kot one more there but they looked too krimson-kolored for good eeting:


Fortunately just downstreem they were a little freshr:
















So the karnage got started: 1 chunk for sashimi, 1 chunk for fryin up:
















Next morning missed a couple on the wogg but did end up with this broot:
















Some of them kohos was bigg!
















And some were silvery on the outside but
















orange on the inside:
















Yum! ALL you can eet, as it should be.

Heer I'm trying to say something about how corvina fishing in Baja sometimes seems like katching kohos, but this this time the koho fishing in Alaska felt kind of like corvina fishing:




Heerz one that ran CIRCLES around me, but hoo looks stoopid now, Mr. Koho????




This pikture was took right before my pickup and I thot about keeping him to bring back -- but again, kind of krimsonish:

















Shor was a great last koho though! Jumped a bunch and ran me into backing on an 8wt, just so I'd remember why these kohos are so damn kool. Whether it's the Naknek or Alagnak or maybe the Kisaralik or Kanektok, I'll be back after them kohos someday again!

A Glimpse, a Glow, and a Vision

I'm not even going to try and make apologies for the kookiness of what I'm thinking, or try to convince anyone that I'm not in fact crazy. If you know me, you already know that I think that what's normally considered normal in America is in fact fairly crazy, and that a little bit of craziness is fairly normal for me. So --

On my Katmai trip I had an experience of the kind that Lakota or Sioux people would probably call a vision. Left to myself, I would probably have just called it an "understanding." But then again, if I hadn't been reading about Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, I might not have called it anything -- I would have just experienced it, and would have been left, like before, with a deep unidentified desire to go back to Katmai and experience it again.

In fact, one aspect of my "vision" is that I realized that I have had very similar experiences before, experiences that I remember vividly but did not until now consider very significant. When I first went into Katmai backcountry in 2006, I stayed in a creek mouth camp where two days running my midday meal was interrupted by a family of four bears walking along the shore. The first time I retreated in a minor panic, honestly quite frightened. The second time, after inspecting their tracks and the chew marks on my wetsuit, I got out of their way much more calmly -- even, you might say, politely. The third time, it was me who walked up on their meal: the four of them, cubs almost as big and fat as their mother, were calmly sitting in a bunch of bushes and munching placidly on leaves, inspecting me carefully but without alarm as I walked around them at maybe 100 feet or less. They noticed me, I noticed them, and what I really, really should have noticed, was that it all seemed as normal as nodding to someone you pass on the sidewalk.

In my small gringo way I had entered their world, which is a natural, wild, undomesticated world as pregnant with meaning as it is beautiful to the senses. Though I didn't see the full meaning of it at the time, I knew it felt good. I fished the creek mouth in a sort of mild euphoria (admittedly, a common sensation while fishing) and paused in my casting when I saw a moose poke its nose out of the trees. Again, that animal (the moose) noticed this animal (myself) and vice versa, and the moose carefully waded across the creek mouth in front of me before folding back into the trees.


Now, without the vision, that just sounds like a guy doing some fishing and wildlife viewing. But no, really, it is more. The animals weren't special things I went out expressly to view, like someone going to a zoo or a gallery. It was more like they were my peers, and we were all cautiously sharing the area around the creek mouth for our own particular purposes. Necessarily, we were aware of each other. But I was not a big bad human with a gun or a noisy flying machine or a crowd of menacing cohorts; and they were not big scary beasts making me run indoors for cover. To be this way in this place for a few days was only a tiny glimpse of the larger, richer world of living together continuously in a sort of "natural culture" with animals like Lakota or other native Americans did in the precolombian world. But a glimpse it was.

In 2008 I paddled out into a zone miles across the lake from that creek, and I left in the evening because a storm was forecast to blow in the next day. This left me looking a little frantically for a campsite as the few mild (but disconcerting) summer hours of half-darkness came down on the lake. The second or third spot I checked turned out to be perfect: a broad, short peninsula, with a rocky headland at the end and nice long beaches on the East and West sides, plus a perfect grassy tent area smack in the middle. I am no religious man, not then nor now, but I remember feeling like there was some kind of "grace" involved in finding this perfect camp exactly when I needed it. Maybe that feeling was an initial clue that the ground was good for vision-seeking.

Little did I know how perfect a camp it would be! I started finding out the next day when I started hooking 34 inch rainbows a quarter mile out of camp. There was a secret pike spot nearby that felt similarly perfect. After waiting out the storm in the nice tree-sheltered tent spot, I spent a couple more blissful days before paddling across the lake, motivated mostly by a sense of duty to continue my trip as planned. Almost as soon as I set out, I felt that camp pulling at me to return. I got nine miles across the lake, looked at the situation, and paddled straight back. All ten nights of my trip were passed there. The words that occurred to me then were "at home." I felt at home at that spot, in a novel and powerful way.

And yes, the animals were there. There were new bear tracks on the beach every morning, all the same size and punctuated by plant-filled scat. I concluded that the bear was shy and at least for the moment, not particularly carnivorous. I took care to keep my food safe and watch out for him, but he remained invisible, walking well around my camp when I was either fishing or asleep. One afternoon I was somewhat shocked to find a half-eaten fish on the beach. Dang! Almost reflexively, I tossed it out into the deepest water I could reach from the beach, and moments later an eagle flew into the trees nearby and gave me a good, hard look. The "noticing" was happening again, and certainly not for the first time on this trip: I had seen the resident eagles every day, and I'm pretty sure they got a half-filleted fish or two from me by diving into the relatively shallow water where I tossed them. Sometimes when I was fighting a nice fish up to the side of the kayak, I'd notice them circling close or settling into a tree, noticing me. Wanting my fish. Probably not taking it personally when they didn't get it -- though the one whose fish I stole must have been pissed off at some eagle-ish level.

I consider that ten-day chunk as more of a glow than just a glimpse.

On this most recent trip, the glow cleared to sharpness at my American Creek camp, a place I have already mentioned in a fishy blog. Wolves howled and left prints all around my camp, and the eagles were ever-present there, "noticing" both me and the ospreys, and regularly stealing fish from the latter. And rather than try to describe my sharp vision in any detail -- probably an impossible undertaking -- I want to focus on the eagles and how they became a point of contact between my environment in camp and my readings in Lame Deer. The significance I have been hinting at is what Lame Deer thought of as "symbolic" significance, and his text has a nifty riff on the eagle as a symbol of American nationalism. He points out that an eagle represents powerful things like freedom, and grace, and shrewdness and fierceness -- but that somehow white Americans, carrying pictures of eagles around on their money and trotting effigies of eagles out on national holidays, are not really sensing that meaning. To contemporary whites, the eagle is there, and we know it is associated with our nationalism; but its significance ends there. The richer, stronger meaning of the eagle is absent.

To me, in my hammock camp surrounded by eagles and wolves, the meaning was present. Very present. I felt it when I woke up in the morning and when I went to sleep at night, and to some degree I acted it out when walked upstream into wild country at night, after all the jet boaters had disappeared and left the wilderness intact. The wind blew hard over my head, and the current was very very strong on my legs as I crossed the creek in areas where I probably shouldn't have done, and deep parts of my brain clicked and flashed when I touched a beautiful wild fish and slipped it back into the water while an eagle circled overhead.

I was at American creek smack in the middle of my 16 days in the bush, and camping, fishing and hiking or paddling were the "ordinary" activities that filled my days. But Lame Deer's narrative points out something very important about ordinariness:

"We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things, which, in our minds, are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us symbols that teach us the meaning of life. This is funny, because we don't even have a word for symbolism, yet we are all wrapped up in it. You have the word, but that is all."

As wondrous as that quote is, and as happy I am with my faltering efforts to write about my vision, the fact remains: these are just words. It will take many more of them, and more references to Lame Deer's philosophy, to keep trying to convey the Katmai "vision." Hopefully I'll get some of them down in this blog, or somewhere -- and hopefully covering the thing with a bunch of words won't do too much violence to it! But actually, I think the bigger risk is to kind of forget about it, and let it get snowed under by the prosaic, sterile unmeaningfulness of my everyday life in California (sad but largely true, and it does no good to pretend otherwise). So I guess the right thing to do is keep writing. Though, if you can sort of "grok" these three photos of wolf tracks, bear trails, and tiny bugs on tinier flowers in the same way they appeared to my "clarified" mind on the trip, then none of these words really would have been required.

Katmai Skies

You cannot buy the sky; you cannot sell the sky; and it is very hard to fit it in a picture frame as well. Nonetheless, I do try, and this blog features some of my meager results.

The Alaskan summer sky is an immeasurably large, constantly changing canvas of clouds and color. Once your mind gets free of the punctuate and frenzied pace of perception we white men call "everyday consciousness," those skies start to seem like a living, acting entity, broadcast on the biggest and most beautiful screen on (or around) the planet.

Anyway, my first day at Brooks presented a classic calm evening sky with lots of moisture and a glowing sunbreak:


On the next day, and the rest of my pre-trip days, the sky got colder and started rubbing with increasing urgency on the earth in the process of what is called "An East Wind:"


When there's an Easter, Katmai Air flies into Brooks Lake instead of Naknek, which means there are shuttles on which me and my boat can hitch rides. Here waiting for a plane is Taylor, who is a fishing guide but nonetheless a good guy:

That day they were flying out a bunch of gear and a single Texan tourist, who watched me put my camping and fishing stuff into the boat and commented on my apparent self-contained program, "you've got the world by the tail there, don't you?" Yes my friend, that is the idea.

Day 1 of my lake journey presented the common scenario where a grey sky comes down close over a grey lake, with a thin layer of green earth between:


That kind of sky creates some really good fishing conditions, so I wasn't complaining. Though, after a couple of days of it I wasn't complaining about a good thorough clearup, either:




What, a movie of the sky? Sure, kind of. Here's the East Wind dogging my northeasterly trending route across Naknek Lake to Fure's cabin:



Fure's is a good place for skywatching, especially after the wind lays down a bit.



I had some really lovely skies at Grosvenor, too.


On the way back to the portage, it's another one of those grey days -- but here, you can see the mountains looming in the back:


OK, I'm going to indulge myself; here's the sky, and also the guy watching the sky.


Here the sky is talking to me, saying, "hey, guess what -- you get another big East wind for crossing the lake again!!" And I am replying by getting giggly and enjoying some wave-surfing as I make the generally southwesterly crossing in beam and tail-ish winds:




But much of the time the sky is like one of your oldest friends, who can sit there with you and feel just fine without making any chitchat.


It is quite possible that I'll be back under those Katmai skies come August, and at that point, there will even be night! Darkness! Stars, if you're lucky! Here in California you can see plenty of those when you get away from all the white men -- which I assure you, I am going to do before too many more days pass here . . . .

1000 Salami Sandwiches

Five lake trout dinners; four rainbow trout; two tasty char. Without that fine, sustaining meat for my fry pan, soaked as it is in omega-3 amino acids, I think my arms would have given up halfway through my 16 day backcountry sojourn. After a day spent paddling around Naknek lake in a minor gale, this is a pretty thing to see:


Even with all the fish in my diet, I was effectively starving. After a week my arms were visibly shrunken. Any mention of food in The New Yorker or The Best Short Stories of 2010 made me wince and cringe. Mercilessly, an article on Silvio Berlusconi, in addition to passing mention of pasta with clam sauce and lasagna and cake, noted that "the P.D.L. was bringing a thousand salami sandwiches to distribute." A thousand salami sandwiches!! I woke several times in the hammock on that blustery night with visions of salami sandwiches blowing in wind like autumn leaves, salami sandwiches lined up like char in a riffle, salami sandwiches heaped in a mound under a belching grizzly bear. You just guess what I had for a late night snack here on my first full day back in California.

Naturally, most of my fish, which this year were more notable in number than size, swam back unfilleted. At Brooks, I worked between the hordes of mustachioed fly flingers (note to self: do not visit again on the opener, when there are more humans than bears; it is much more fun to dodge bears than Simms-clad Anchorage types) and got my first official trout on a stimmy shown downstream:


And I got reacquainted with my old pal closer to the outlet that likes black leeches:

And a chunky feller that just about pulled my arm off when he grabbed a customized sculpin-swinging rig (I confess, I enjoyed scandalizing all the purist Anchorage-ites by fishing an indicator rig with plenty weight. Fuck those little Thunder Creek patterns, you goobers!).


By the way, many of the goobers were actually good guys and fun to hang out with in camp.



On a day off from the river mayhem, I hitched rides from the lodge staff up to Brooks Lake and harvested a small laker that seemed perfectly made to lay on this log and break in my new Swiss Army knife:


Finally launched out on the lake, I start the real carnage. A laker bleeds out:


Provides more work for my new knife (thanks again, Pavel!)


And then gets back-burnered to dinner by a very lunchable trout:


After three days of beautiful cloudy but relatively calm weather, a big East wind (to Katmai what the Norte is to the Sea of Cortez) comes up and makes my crossing to Fure's cabin a decidedly high-calorie event. Fortunately, one calm lee on the lake provides some protein for me:



At Grosvenor, I tried not to waste calories fishing below the surface film -- not when crease flies looked good to dollies:


And lakers were taking even dorado-grade poppers:


Photo credits for that go to Ray at Grosvenor Lodge, who is a great guy and a guide who doesn't suck:


Filming on my own, I tried to get a topwater hookup into a movie, but something always went wrong (I erased the film where the crease fly uproots a small tree on backcast and launches it into the current). In this clip, I miss a take at :30, flip the fly back out, and unbutton another take at :45!

In American Creek, dolly varden/char were as abundant as 1000 salami sandwiches. Almost all of them had a really distinctive yellow-lip coloring that I'm not sure I have seen elsewhere:


And a few had some really beautiful red coloring (the flesh of the river char was dark red too, and insanely delicious, while the lake char had bright orange flesh that was insanely delicious).


Most probably, all those douchey "sports" flying into American Creek were there for the rainbows, which came a bit thin at a rate of one per dozen char. Anywhere I have been in Alaska that lacked rainbows also lacked fishing pressure and was rich in solitude, and I think I may have reached the point where I'll just avoid the "premier game fish" on my trips. For me, it is much more fun to catch species that don't exist here in CA, especially when they have big nasty teeth and extremely aggressive attitudes:


I mean, did you ever see a trout do this to a fly?


That is the remains of 50% of my Dahlberg Diver supply, and in the end the other 50% got the hook clipped off when I was trying to release another chunker pike with hemostats. No matter; I kept fishing the hookless fly for a happy half-hour, amazed at how long they'd hang on to the thing before letting go. If you see anything like this while swimming in any lake, I recommend exiting the water immediately:




Oh and leave the red and white speedo at home. Armed with a Diver, a black leech, and a red & white spoon to find where they're holding, I am transformed into my alter ego named Dances with Pike.


I'm a fly buyer not a fly tier, and I'm not above taking possession of a Thunder Creek fry pattern that some numbnuts left in a trout's mouth, dangling what appeared to 6 or 7x tippet (I mean, come on dude); also, I am an inheritor of flies in a small way. I'm not sure if this classic smoltish pattern came out my maternal grandfather's box or a box of flies that my father kept for a while, but I can confirm that twenty-first century rainbows find it perfectly acceptable:


And lakers like it fine too:


My battery indicator started to red-line when I got back over to Naknek Lake, but I still squandered power on the kind of two-footers that seemed to be my upper limit this year . . .


. . . so you can go ahead and accuse me of fish-taling when I say that on my 15th and last day on the lakes -- a day on which I explicitly went "trophy hunting" with my ugly-ass Jet Divers and Kwikfish plugs and spoons on braided line -- I finally got into not one but two of the classic Naknek bows that stretch out over 30 inches and start getting REAL deep and fat. I currently have no physical camera battery at all, and this is why: 1) hook 30+ fatty and discover that camera says "Cambie la batteria"; 2) remove battery from camera and stick it in armpit to try and warm it up for one more shot; 3) try to reinstate battery with shaking hands and angry trout at yakside, and lo! 4) Oh yeah, that's the battery jumping overboard and sinking into 40 feet of pure Katmai lake water!!

He he. I could only sit and laugh bitterly at this idiot named Litters Lakes with Lithium. Got another giant that same day trolling a spoon directly tied to 40 pound braided line, and if you ever get jaded with spin fishing and need a quick reminder that you are alive, just get a feel for a healthy bow on that kind of inflexible tackle. It's like they are hitting you on the elbow and shoulder with a wooden bat. When I paddled out the next day, facing 10 miles of headwind after over-paddling during my trophy hunt on the heels of a very strenuous East wind crossing the previous day (read, tired as fuck and very apt to be grumpy), ANOTHER 30+ chunker came on the spoon/braided line rig for my Bay of Islands farewell. Because there was no way I was going to pull in another one of those beasts and still have juice in my arms for the paddle back to Brooks. Where, needless to say, I got into a bunch of beautiful sockeyes and trout, including on mouse patterns, of which there will be no pictures due to La bateria cayo en las profundidades del lago. But you trust me, right?

That about exhausts my fishy pictures, but I think I've got a couple more blogs worth of landscapes and that kind of crap.