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!

Intermission

I've been to Alaska all the past three summers since 2004, and every time my return has followed the same emotional pattern: the first week back I am elated to be in a real town with hot showers and good sushi and tragically hip cafes where you can sit and watch beautiful people go casually about their business without a single thought of running into a grizzly bear; the second week, I am a little less thrilled and even perhaps a bit bored; and then by the third week, I am petulantly discontent, wishing I was back on the river and cursing the distance between me and the summer salmon runs of the North.

Certainly that has been the story this time. I've worked hard to fill the time and have made a point of hanging out with all my favorite people in the area. I even went out to the East Sierra and did some car camping and social fishing with a couple of friends and even a friend's wife -- and let me tell you, I got way, way more sun out in those arid hills than I really needed. Ten minutes of East Sierra sun covered the entire amount of heat and direct rays that I enjoyed in three weeks of Alaskan weather.

However, one of those friends just happened to be planning an Alaskan float for 8/20, and I just happened to volunteer myself in case any of his three buddies defaulted, and to make a long story short, I just happen to be going back to Alaska in a few days. And my, don't it feel right! It's just in time to head off those third-week willies. And indeed, it lets me say that I really did play a full sonata after all, with distinct instrumentation and arrangement in each movement: 168.5 inflatable kayak miles in Tikchik country; 65 miles sea kayaking in the Wood Lakes; and a concluding 90 miles or so rafting down the Kanektok. My mind is full of fresh cohos and sea-run char, punctuated by the savage strike of big trout taking flesh flies out of the current. What's more, there is going to be some quality accompaniment, which is sure to share the whisky, the sashimi, and the wogging. It all makes that low, disorganized but promising sound of an orchestra tuning up as intermission comes to an end.

Yes gentle readers, this does mean that you may have to endure another flurry of fish pictures and maybe even a few more silly film clips. I apologize. But this is it; life will go back to normal sometime in September and the fish talk will go back down to a manageable trickle. But for now, raise the baton, conductor, and fly me back to Alaska! Bravo!!!!

Quite a Stream

As a lot of people know, there is a very good trout stream flowing into Lake Nerka. If I intentionally fail to name that stream while blogging about it, my reticence doesn't come from a deliberate, logical attempt to keep it a secret -- because it is already far, far from one -- but from a deep sense that it's wrong to 'hype up' any particular piece of water publicly and thereby have the guilty feeling that you have raised the amount of pressure on the fish there without even getting to directly enjoy it. I mean, if fish are going to be relentlessly harrassed, I want to be in on it! And if you figure the name out from all the hundred clues I have typed, then it's your own fault.

If you camped on this stream, as I did, you could wake up at 5:00 a. m. (top of the Alaskan summer morning) and pretend that it really is a secret spot. You might have to share the water with a couple of nice guys from Seattle who have been flying in there and camping out for many years just during the late July dry fly window, but they would be quiet, respectful guys just like you and wouldn't think of crowding you in any way. You could enjoy huge stretches of world-class trout water in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

But instead, let's say you sleep in to 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. This is as late as you are ever going to sleep on this stream during the trout season, unless you are deaf. Float planes landing 100 feet away are LOUD. One, two . . . three or maybe four planes come in all with a twenty minute window or so. They roar away, and then you hear the jet boat motors starting up and whining. You smell the burning oil, too, because the boats all come by your beachside camp on their way to the outlet. And from this hour until 5:00 or 6:00 p. m., all of these guided fishers will be jetting hither and thither in their boats, or getting pushed from slot to slot by guides who jump down into the water and work the boats like rickshaws. The state park has placed a limit on the number of guided rods that can fish the river during a day, but their limit is a good deal more generous than yours.

So if you're not a morning person nor a particulary gregarious one, your fishing day starts at the cocktail hour. And this ain't such a bad thing. By that time the fish are keying onto bugs on the surface, and there are few things more engrossing than a two-foot long rainbow trout rising on a reliable rhythm one long cast away from where you stand. I found that these hard-fished fellas would only take on a downstream, stack-mended presentation, but when the drift went right and the fish took, oh boy, hold on to the rod! They are hot ones. Whether it's the good food or the cold oxygenated water, these trout are champion runners. Very inconveniently for me, a solo guy, they would not sit still for a picture even after twenty minutes or so of fighting. Witness the angler's exasperated tone in this film clip, almost as though he were angry at the fish for fighting so long and hard.

I had a great time there. Fishing with Bob and Rick and occasionally talking to the friendly park ranger helped pass the time very pleasantly. I had a flask of Isle of Jura single malt whisky, and they had Laphroig and Macallan. And really, a bit of daytime fishing among the lords and their menservants wasn't so bad. I got the pleasant feeling of a showoff by casting dries while they did "technical nymphing" -- it seems that in Alaska, if you use a hook smaller than 6 and a leader less than 1X, you get to call it "technical." There were so many trout following the sockeyes into that river that we had plenty, plenty of fish for one and all. Apparently, just by accident, I hit it between the streamer-heavy smolt outmigration and the egg-heavy sockeye spawn, just when these big fat trout were most likely to feed on caddis and mayflies on the surface. I won't make that mistake again! I'll do it very deliberately.

Photography Difficulty

Here is the link to the photo album of my trip. I lament my poor skills as a photographer. Excuses follow.

One of the biggest favors a fishing buddy can do for you is to help you take a picture. When you fish alone, each catch-and-release photo becomes a comedy; you have to get the camera out with one hand, hold it in your mouth for a moment, make sure it doesn't get wet, hold it at very awkward angles while making sure not to swim, and all the while the fish is understandably trying to take advantage of the improved opportunity to make an escape. Often enough, the leader gets wrapped around your leg and snaps, or the hook just pops out, exactly in the moment before you were going to take the picture.

That's why most of the decent pictures of fish are pictures of dead fish. Dead fish (which are of course headed for the fry pan) are quite the opposite of the live ones, even allowing you to set up a timer and take the classic shite-eating grin shot. Every once in a while you do score on a live fish, as with this lucky flash shot of an Agulukpak bow:



I took some films that amused me, and I hope you will enjoy them too. But they too suffer from bad filming conditions. Most times I started filming too late, or stopped too soon, to get the good stuff. This clip of a bear running along the Tikchik river is an example; just before I started filming, the bear was making a really strange roaring sound. And then, right after I stopped filming, partly out of a desire to have both hands on the paddle if the bear came down, well, the bear came down! He crashed into the water right near me, stood up on his hind legs to get a good look, and then ran away up the riverbank as though the water were boiling hot. This was spectacular, and would have made a great film clip.

I think many of the pictures could use some explaining. For instance, "who is this George Taylor in Ekwok? What, and where, is Ekwok?" In the past I used to write such verbiage into the photo album pages, but now I'll address those issues haphazardly here in my blog. I'd like to devote a whole entry to Ekwok, which is one of the most unique towns I have seen within the borders of the United States. George is perhaps the nicest guy in that town. If you're curious, tune back in later for details.