Back Setback

What strikes me most about getting old is the diminishing amount of time. As you age, time starts to run out on you. The world, however, stays just as large as ever, and the amount of water you haven't yet fished remains dauntingly immense. You look at what you've accomplished in the first half (or two thirds!) of your life, and you realize that you'd better hurry up and get things done.

Motivated in large part by this general sense of urgency, I packed several activities into the 24-hour period starting last Friday. I grabbed an hour and worked out with weights at the Google gym before ending the work week. Saturday morning, I did a bunch of work on the computer, hunched over it in a typically unergonomic manner. Then I threw the kayak on top of the truck and drove over to paddle ten windy miles on the Petaluma River (no strikes), stopping both before and after to help a friend of mine lift a large band saw in and out of his truck. While we were watching soccer and drinking beer I noticed a slightly odd feeling in my back, but decided to ignore it. After all, I needed to come home at midnight and lift the boat around and hose down all my salty gear before getting into bed. I need my back to just quietly do its job so that I can do the things I do.

I could no longer ignore my back when my eyes opened the next morning. Coming out of sleep, my dreamish mind could have sworn that a heavy specimen of Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis was sitting on my lower back and gloating as he twisted around a large, crude spear head that was thrust deep under my right scapula. I am talking REAL pain, so bad that I was genuinely awed by the raw intensity of it. I couldn't move without making the spearhead twist. I couldn't bend my neck down one millimeter from a strangely cramped position. I couldn't even go to work for three days -- I was really and truly down for the count.



If you are an active person who depends somewhat on getting outside for your general sense of well-being, then maybe you can imagine my sinking spirits. All this was especially depressing because it happened in the heart of my paddling ramp-up for a Christmas time sojourn fishing on the Sea of Cortez. They told me it would be windy and tough conditions, and I shrugged it off thinking, "whatever, I'm a pretty strong paddler here." With my rhomboids in spasm, I couldn't even shrug at all! Paddling around in the wind was hard to imagine. Very depressing.

OK, I'll stop whining and cut to the good news: the caveman gave up and went back to extinction on Thursday, and by Sunday I was out on the bay doing an experimental two-mile paddle (no strikes). So far, no recurrence of any bad symptoms, and the flexibility of my neck is back to normal. I'm having high hopes of doing a decent delta paddle this weekend (some strikes? Please?) and going down to Baja as planned.

What is the plan? Basically this: after visiting my favorite uncle in Palm Desert, make the hard drive all the way down to Magdalena Bay, perhaps stopping to do a bit of paddling at San Lucas Cove. In fact, I'd go no further than San Lucas but for the poor timing of the season and the worse timing of the tides, which should be pretty extreme around the 12/23 full moon. "Mag Bay," by contrast, will have mellow conditions and tends to fish well year-round I hear. By the time I turn back north, the tides will be better for a couple of stops on the way, the last of which may include some cool paddling around the Enchanted Isles near Puertecitos, which I hope will be interrupted early and often by the strikes of triggerfish, pargo, grouper and perhaps a bonus corvina or yellowtail. We shall see.

One thing's for sure: the phrase, "well, at least you have your health!" is no idle platitude . . . .

Home Truths

On my recent trip back East I saw one friend propose marriage to his girlfriend, helped another friend bury his mother's remains, and helped another friend get into a five-pound smallmouth.

"That's the biggest bass I've caught all year," he said.
"You just haven't been going with the right guide," I said.

It was an intense and rushed five-day weekend back in New England, full of emotional and memorable moments. But like Nick Hornby's Arsenal-based memory in Fever Pitch, my memories of this trip will hinge on my personal obsessions -- on the sharp visual recall of a bronze finned missile sailing through the air, spraying us with lake water as he tail-walked next to the canoe, and breaking the rusted hook on my balsa popper (the guide let his five-pounder get away, intentionally of course).

We got these fish on the same lake that I visited back in a June post. It is a special place partially under protection from Acadia National Park, and its specialness for me is proven by my adamant efforts to carve out an evening to fish there with my old friend in the old canoe that he inherited from me. To clear Tuesday evening I had to dine with my parents Monday evening, which meant rushing out of Massachussetts and doing a hard-nosed six hour drive from weekend party scenes in Northampton. It ain't easy rallying your hung-over buddies to start a Monday morning road trip, but I did it with the motivation of lake water lapping by the shore (see the third stanza).

In a way this lake is truly the home water of my childhood fishing origins, while the Pit River is more my adopted adult home. We go there and regress, with my friend Stroutster usually bringing worms and fishing them under a bobber like we did at age 12. A few years back, I took the hook out of the mouth of a small yellow perch, stuck it back under his dorsal fin (Ow! Sorry PETA!) and before long, no kidding, a big fat smallmouth took that bobber for the ride of its life. On this latest trip we operated under the all-artificials rules for October, with Strout taking his fish on a krocodile spoon I had left over from Alaska, and me working poppers on the floating line. I guess we may be finally growing up.

Ah, and we all know where that ends! Let me tell you that, after helping my friend bury his mother, I went straight back to my parent's home and gave my mom a pretty urgent hug. Inevitably, we fell to talking about hers and my father's wishes for the scattering of their remains, and her answer briefly took my breath: she named the very lake I have been writing about. She and my dad too, have had some special times there. I have fished with both of my grandfathers, now dead, on that lake.

So it makes sense why they would want it to be their final resting place, this beautiful glacially carved lake full of healthy fish. It makes sense, too, that I keep wanting to go back there to connect up with so many factors: with my childhood joy, with the sense of being together with my parents and grandparents, with the real sense of bonding with my fishing buddy, with the sense of being young and being older too, with the sense of beauty all around and peace inside -- to wit, if I may continue Nietzscheanly in this sappily symphonic vein of prose -- to have a strong and acute sense of just BEING.

I'm afraid I could keep going on with this psychobabble and philosobabble. That's what you get when you take a personal passion like Arsenal football or fly fishing and make it the main organizing factor in your life. But this is a fishing blog, so let's not let it stray to far into the author. Let's think about getting back to that lake in Maine in August (following the proposal-friend's marriage) when they'll be even more aggressive to topwater flies, and maybe even taking the time to get out to storied spots like West Grand Lake on the kayak. In the end, though, pound-for-pound, the bass from a certain lake on MDI are the heaviest of any.

New Tricks

Pit Boss is getting old. On his most recent Trifecta trip, he stumbled around in the current, banged his feet into a painful tenderness, and wondered if an era had ended. I used to get so fired up to go up there and stagger around on the slippery rocks, fishing deep slots in the canyon. And now, though I still find the Pit River beautiful and wonderful, I have to admit that I'm less drawn to the aggressive stream wading and more drawn to types of fishing that involve kayaks, perhaps some salty water, and hopefully some fish that are counted more appropriately in pounds than inches.

Enter, right on cue, my first California halibut! I haven't made many serious attempts after them due to the depths, weights and baits involved. But now I know that, under the right conditions, you can catch a flatfish on a lure that runs around four feet deep. I was trolling an x-rap around striperish rocks near the top of the tide Friday when I got the strike of the year -- BOOM! something hit the lure so hard that the rod came flying over the cockpit rim and hit me in the chest before nearly being pulled back into the water. In this most uncharacteristic failure of my improvised rod-holding setup (which held the strike of 93 pound tarpon, after all), the bale of the reel got pried open, and I held the deeply bent rod for about 1.43 seconds trying frantically to pop it back in before the fish suddenly shook the hook free. "Whoah," I'm thinking, "was that a 25-pound striper -- or what?"

It was probably a 'butt. Trolling back over the same area I eventually got a smaller but still solid strike that came up big, brown and flat. A California halibut has to be 22 inches to be legal, and this one appeared to be just a wee bit bigger judged by the way he lay flopped over both sides of my cockpit. Not that he laid there for more than .37 seconds -- this guy gave up the fight pretty quickly, but reserved plenty of energy to make a terrible ruckus at kayakside. Lacking any kind of club and needing to bleed the fish for the table anyway, I jumped deep into the sea of bad karma and just cut the hallie's gills and let him take a few minutes to quiet down that way.

The next bit of knifework had me stumped: "so how do I fillet this flattened-out freak of nature?" For certainly a halibut is freakish, with its upturned crosseyes, tiny little gut cavity, and long, meaty flanks. It occured to me that halibut must have to feed constantly to stay fed, while a big-mouthed, fat old striper can gorge and nap Thanksgiving style. Anyway, the internets do come to the rescue again with helpful illustrated instructions on how to fillet a halibut.



Following a satisfying Sunday fish fry, I decided it is worth the effort. Not sure if I'm going to start drowning dead sardines with a six-ounce sinker, but I do think I might start refining my jigging technique. One can imagine how tasty a fat, fresh Alaskan halibut would be . . . and next summer I shall be quite determined to find out about that.



Speaking of new tricks, another notion filling up my fishing imagination is a trip to Baja California. Sierra, pargo, snapper, corvina, yellowtail -- how is it that this didn't occur to me before? A fishy friend has been stoking me up with his recent tales of billfish and dorado down in Cabo (by the way JT, if you are reading, would you like a couple of small halibut fillets?) By the end of my current work contract in February at the latest, I'm going to see about adding some of those new species to the list too. The future remains bright as a high seas sockeye!

Collateral Damage

Originally trained on Maine lobster (mm, tomalley) with a four-year degree in Japanese sushi (minor in sashimi), your correspondent is voraciously piscivorous. Shad? Sardines? Little crispy smelts? Lemme at em! And yet, I almost never kill and eat a striped bass for a very simple reason: I'm already mad enough without further increasing the mercury levels underneath my hat. Big stripers get plenty of mercury concentrated in their flesh after years and years of eating thousands of smaller fish, each packing its own little toxic punch. Naturally there are many fisher folk out there who love to kill and keep a big show-off fish, but god save their brains and livers. I release big stripers and only very occasionally keep a small one to sautee.

Now, about the nine pound, 28-inch striper I am about to describe here -- we DID try to release him. I hooked him on a plug with only the rear treble hook attached, and I fought him in as fast as I could to keep him from getting fatally overtaxed. If anyone needs proof of that, witness exhibit A, the remains of said plug:


Obviously, that fish was pulling hard. And I think I know why: when we got him boatside, he was bleeding profusely out of his gills. The hook -- including the bent tine -- was firmly in his bony lip, but I theorize that he swallowed it deep on the initial take, and ripped the hook up through one of his gills before embedding it deep in the lip. Ouch! And dang. This is sad. Stripers are tough customers (I once knifed and clubbed a small one before watching it jump off my kayak deck and swim away), so we figured on giving him a chance to recover . . . but he bellied up, and we ended up scooping him back up with the net.

This sad death through collateral damage is unfortunate, but not an entire waste. For one, my neighbor's cat Jose got to scarf up some delightful little scraps of fish innards.



The neighbor herself, who states firmly that she will have no more kids and can therefore handle a little mercury, got a nice three pound filet to bake. A highly piscivorous friend down in Santa Cruz took the other filets with a vow to mate it with lemongrass and other good things. And, last but not least, I made a lovely little lemon-and-capers sautee out of the tail ends for Sunday lunch. Probably none of this fine unfortunate fish will go into the freezer to be forgotten for months, which is surely the fate of so many of the 'trophy' stripers that people kill and keep.

This fish was landed on a small but well-rigged motorboat belonging to my friend Mike. It is a MUCH better platform for fly casting than a kayak, and I do hope he'll take me out again despite the blood and savagery that I brought onto the clean floor of his boat. The spot is good kayaking grounds, too, and overall this is a good sign of striper happiness to come. Can't wait until the delta starts turning on!

As a side note, you may notice over the course of these blogs that your correspondent is rather hard on equipment, including reels run over by trucks, rods broken while wave surfing, and plugs twisted into scraps by stripers. I'm reminded of a time when I somehow ended up watching a bit of "Survivorman" on TV with some of my 'indoor friends.' They said to me,

"Hey Gillie, this is the kind of stuff you do out there, right? Eat bugs and sleep in swamps, right?" And I said,

"Wrong. I buy the best equipment I can afford, surround myself with it, and then destroy it piece by piece."

Some casualties of the summer in Alaska: middle pole of MSR four-season tent; new handheld depth finder; Altitech barometer clock (which wasn't as waterproof as it claimed); third in a series of surprisingly fragile GPS units; and so on. Certainly a few fish died and got digested, but all of that was intentional. Going forward, I will keep striving to hold down the collateral damage.

Getting Back to Ekwok

I mentioned that I wanted to write something more about Ekwok, and I still do. Actually, I'd like to get back to Ekwok physically as well as verbally, since it is a very logical take-out for a trip down from Twin Lakes through the Chilikadrotna and the Mulchatna, or a similar route down the Stuyahok or Koktuli. The idea of the long three-river float only tightened its grip on my imagination this summer. And the idea of using village flight service instead of expensive float planes just makes sense.

What makes Ekwok interesting to write about is its status as a native village. That makes it a bit tricky, too, for I am a white boy and I may get in trouble if my comments end up sounding insensitive or condescending or in any way verbally oppressive. I live in the middle of Berkeley, and I do NOT want the Berkeley Thought Police to show up at my door in a Prius and disarm me with a severe astral tai-chi advanced yoga down-dog beat-down.

But you can't pretend it doesn't matter. One of the first things I heard from the first two guys I met in Ekwok was a joke about bears: the reason I didn't have any trouble with them is simply that they don't like white meat, haw haw. They were friendly enough guys but they both had liquor on their breath at 2 p. m. in a supposedly dry town. I tried to ingratiate myself with the first guy by giving him my eight pound anchor, which I no longer needed. I'm pretty sure he was pretty pleased. I saw this guy one more time before flying out of town the next day, when he showed up at my camp to brag to me about his fresh marks and bruises from the night's fighting. This time it was 8 a. m. liquor breath.

Have I done it already? Are the BTP coming in the Prius to stop me stereotyping native Americans as wild drinkers? If so, they are too late. When I really needed them was when a guy appeared outside my hotel room in the middle of the night in Anchorage with his entire t-shirt spattered with blood.

"Jesus buddy, are you OK? Have you been shot?"
"No man, I've just been fighting," the guy slurred. "I've been fightin' em ALL tonight!"

But let's get my narrative back to Ekwok, where I set up a camp on the gravel of the airstrip and dried out my boat and tent in one of the only sunny days of my entire trip. While I was busy with this, at least fifty four-wheelers drove by my camp, often with four or five people hanging on them, and sometimes with people waving to me as they checked me out. In a town where the full-sized roads peter out into forest single-track after just a few miles, cars and trucks are very few. The four-wheeler is king. And the cheechako camped out at the airport is entertainment! After several dozen four-wheelers had paraded by, one finally stopped to say hello. This was George Taylor, who not only introduced me to his wife Vera, but invited me to get on the other fender and come over for coffee. I said I was just laying down for the night but would love to take him up on that offer in the morning.

And so I did! And I'm glad I did. George was a genuinely kind man who seemed to sense what I really needed after two weeks on the river alone, and provided it: morning coffee, a phone for checking on planes, and intelligent conversation. This mellow old fellow, it turned out, was a rabid environmentalist determined to stop the Pebble Mine much as John Muir was determined to stop the O'Shaugnessy dam. I hope he and his associates at http://www.stoppebblemine.com/ end up doing better than John did. George seemed deeply offended that people would even consider putting a mine at the headwaters of the river that ran by his home and provided the salmon for his backyard smokehouse. "They've got a hundred-year history of making fools of us, but I'll tell you, this old Eskimo knows when they're pulling the wool over his eyes."

George actually was an eskimo, a transplant from native lands far north of Ekwok. This apparently made him something of an outsider in Ekwok, which may be what made him sympathetic and kind to the cheechako over on the airstrip. His wife Vera was a true Ekwok native, and I was amused to see that even after only a day in town I recognized a few of the people in her numerous family photos on the wall. Before I left to go catch my plane George made sure to give me a copy of "Shadows on the Koyukuk," which is the bildungsroman of a half-white half-native from the native lands north of the Yukon river. It is a very good, recommendable read for anyone interested in Alaska.

It's funny what an unexpected dose of human warmth from unexpected quarters can do for your psyche. I had to sit several hours in the rain on the Ekwok airstrip waiting for my plane, but I did so with a rather pleasant sense of being in a special, pleasant place (it helped that the town mailman, a guy named Bill, took my water bottle and filled it with hot coffee for me). Sitting there on the bags containing my boat and camping gear, I got some of the odd sense of being a highly random element that accidentally fell into the correct spot in the puzzle, if only momentarily. I've had this sense when landing the tarpon with the Nicaraguan dudes (see January) and a few other times in Japan and elsewhere.



Speaking of elsewhere, the last couple days of my last float ended in a coastal native village called Quinhagak. In Quinhagak there was another airstrip wait, though this one was drier and less lonely; my four buddies and I got special visits from the local artisans who had lots of handcrafts and really seemed to want to exchange them for some hard currency. I step carefully here again, checking the windows for the paisley Prius . . . but just imagine if I were ignorant enough of the marine species protection act, and fascinated enough by local foods and customs, to ask if there might be any seal oil on sale? According to the protagonist of "Shadows on the Koyukuk" and other sources, a little bit of seal oil goes a long way to making a cold outdoorsman warm again, and giving him energy and strength. Western experts note that it is super-rich in omega 3 acids. And if, hypothetically, it were legal to possess, I myself might even consider keeping a small vial of it among my kayaking gear, just in case of cold times.



Ekwok will soon be starting its nice long winter. I hope George will have time to read the two books I sent him: "Coming into the Country" by John McPhee and "Sketches from a Hunter's Album" by Ivan Turgenev. After taking in the native perspective on the wild country, I wanted to send him some cheechako perspectives on the same. McPhee's book is about the Yukon country, with a great essay on floating down the Kobuk. I'm curious to see what George makes of it. I also want to see if he agrees that Turgenev describes weather and country and animals like no other writer. There's snail mail to Ekwok in the near future! And, in the more distant, I hope, more visits.

Another Little Lesson

Triton says this: thou shouldst not surf boat wakes with fly rods lashed to thy rigging.

Surfing your kayak is both fun and practical. Leaning forward a bit and riding out a wind wave or wake will get you from A to B a lot more quickly than letting the waves roll under your boat (though don't forget that the way back to A lies against the force of the waves. Plus, Triton also saith: beware when the tidal current turneth against the wave). I can't remember the name, but there is an expert, godlike kayaker, known for his trips in arctic, who makes incredible average speeds on the open water by surfing swells and waves as much as possible.

But Triton does not like his waves to be trifled with. In a playful, show-offish mood yesterday, I saw the Larkspur ferry launching and figured I would show my kayak fishing buddy Jim how easy it is to get a wave ride off its wake. I've done this before, and I did indeed double-check that both rods, spin and fly, were secure in their usual places. And when the wake came along, down went the bow, up went the stern, and WHEEEEE! Or wait -- is that the tip of my superexpensive Sage 8wt bending down under the water like that? Wow, is that the rod breaking on the second section down, and hanging weakly on like a snapped twig?

Sure enough, that's what it was. Maybe that little wake ride wasn't such a brilliant idea.

Fortunately, the rod is covered for repairs, and better yet, we ended up not needing fly rods on that outing. I found one small fish right after launching, but that was it. The typical process of elimination begins: so far, the early fall stripers are not where we have fished. When we fished there, anyway.

While I was at the launch dealing with all the gearables -- the rudder, the GPS unit, the sponsons, the pump and paddle float, etc. etc. -- some old fella out of an RV stood and stared intently at my every move. To my "how's it going up there?" he nodded and just kept staring. At length, he ventures to say,

"That looks like a LOT of work!"

To which I reply unthinkingly, "Yeah, especially if you're LAZY."

And that kind of ended the conversation. Snap off! Including rod tips, alas, especially if you're STUPID.

The Kanektok Klan

It really has been the summer of the "K." All the half-dozen rivers I fished in Alaska are rich in K's: Tikchik, Nuyakuk, Nushagak, Agulukpak, Agulowak, and Kanektok. Let's not get into the tributaries, either (Nukluk, Kanuktik, Klak, Upnuk, Koneruk, Klutuk and Tunravik). If I'd gone a little past Ekwok, I might have tried for chinooks at the mouth of Koklong creek. Targets for next year include the Kisaralik and Kasigluk rivers, or perhaps the Kwethluk or even the Kukaklek branch of the Alagnak again.

On this last leg with the Kanektok Klan, the K factor really kicked in. Kommunikation between our two waterkraft was karried out on walky talkies like this:

"This is the Kanektok Kid hailing King Kanektok, do you kopy?"
"King Kanektok here, karry on Kid."
"We just lokated a large pod of Kohos at the Nukluk konfluence, river right."

Kamping with the Klan was a whole different kettle of fish than camping alone. For one, bear-safe practices were kept to a minimum. We kept all our food in two big coolers that rode in the rafts by day and sat amid the tents at night. Our boats were quickly sprinkled with power bar wrappers and other stinky stuff, such as waterlogged turkey jerky. In the end, I committed the worst of all infractions myself, when I completely forgot about a ziploc baggie of salmon roe and left it outside of King Kanektok's tent by accident. Good thing a bear didn't come around that night, or it would have been quite a showdown!



But good company is a great thing. We had some memorable feasts on seared coho fillets and smoked char, all washed down with three varieties of single malt scotch and draughts from two separate bags of good wine, each containing five full bottles each. Dead tired from a day of fishing and full of good food and drink, we tended to sit around the fire and listen with amusement as the level of discourse descended like water down a cascade. However, we did come up with some practical thoughts, such as how to most effectively beat off any bears that might come into camp . . . .

One undeniable benefit of having some fishing buddies is the ability to fish while on the move. I've been known to hook a few from the inflatable kayak, but it's pretty hard work keeping the boat pointed the right way and the line free of slack at the same time. With a skilled rower like Bluegrass Bill or Jet (using our usernames from ncffb.org for a moment), you can fish very effectively as you float on down. Both this nice rainbow and this colorful char were hooked while just floating on down the Kanektok.





Of course, having a pal take your picture with the fish -- the so-called "hero shot" -- is also pretty kool. Our group took that to an even higher level with a high-quality film camera manned by the talented GM, creator of films on the Arolik and Kisaralik rivers, as well as our local treasure the Trinity. GM did more filming than fishing and earned his indian name, "Fishes with Camera." I hope to poach a few bits of his film to post here if I can. Definitely, I will try to obtain and post some his excellent still shots, not least because one of them depicts what is probably the biggest rainbow of the trip cradled heroically in my very own hands. For now, here's a nice coho taken for me by flys4b8 (who cracked me up badly one night by talking about "socko" salmon, a cross between the sockeye and coho, apparently):



So stay tuned for those additional pictures and any other tales that come from my rekollektions in trankwility. Krikey!