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.