I’ve never been much of a fisherman, Kane however, is natural born. He’s spent enough time with his Papa (Kim’s Dad) to learn his craft, and to exhibit the passion and patience equal to Bill Dance. He flat out loves to fish.
And so, how could we take the lad to Alaska, and not turn him loose? After Fairbanks, Denali NP, and Anchorage, we planned to spend some time exploring the Kenai Peninsula (AKA “Alaska’s Playground”) which is famous for two things… salmon and halibut fishing. Our first stop in Kenai was Cooper Landing, which is at the top of the Kenai River, and a great place to take a fishing trip along the “upper Kenai”. This is a pretty big, fast, beautiful river. The water is the milky, aqua blue, that is telltale of glacial melt.
Guided fishing trips are a bit pricy, so just Kane and I went. We booked a 1/2 day (4 hour) trip in a drift boat (the guide is also the rower). The guide’s name was Jason, and when I spoke to Jason on the phone, he was in full “expectation setting” mode. He strongly suggested that we fish for trout in order to keep Kane busy, happy, and engaged. He said, he had be “killing’m” this season until 3/4 trips ago, and they stopped biting. I told him that we’d really hoped to catch a salmon, and suggested that we start going for Salmon and shift gears to trout if need be. He grumbled about the trout fishing being best at the top of the trip etc. The thing is, Jason has no idea the depth of patience and terrific attitude on the water that Kane has.
When the trip started (we started at 7am), Jason said, well, if you want to hunt Salmon, you need time, we better just go for it! He gave us a quick lesson on the gear (pretty heavy graphite rods, with braided 30 lb test line, open faced spinner reels, monofiiment leaders, and vibrax spinners), and we drifted down to the first “silver hole”. It turns out the best place to fish for salmon are the “calm waters” on the back side of bends. Jason coached us to cast upstream, and reel the lures in across the break in the water (the line where the swift current meets the calm water). As we pulled into the first hole, we could see salmon jumping (mostly red sockeyes that we could not keep and were too mature to eat anyway). As we moved down the river, we started to see more silvers roll at the top of the water. The fish were there, but not biting.
After about 1 hour, with no bites, we started experimenting with different lures. We could still see the fish there taunting us almost.
At a bit past 2 hours, with no bites, Kane looked at me and said “do you want to start fishing for trout?”. I was shocked that he was losing his confidence, but I suppose probably the fact that we’d not caught anything in a few weeks, and he knew the trip cost real money. I told him, we can see the fish here, we just need to find the right lures, let’s keep trying. Literally two casts later, Kane caught a 10 pound silver salmon. He was thrilled. Jason tried to get him to howl like a coyote, but that was a bit beyond his comfort zone! If Kat were there, I’m sure she would have howled for him! Jason clubbed it to death, we snapped a few pics, and he put it on a stringer.
I asked Jason to switch my lure to match Kanes… it was a bright orange vibrax spinner. He obliged.
About 20 minutes later, Kane catches ANOTHER 10 pounder! Now he’s really excited. Jason started calling Kane “Big Stick”. When other boats came by with nothing caught, he would hold up the fish and announce that they were caught by the 10 year old! If Kane had a hat on, it would have been shredded like the Hulk’s clothing.
Heading to the next hole, I looked at my lure and realized Jason had put a shiny brass spinner on my rod instead of the orange one. My bad, I should have checked it out sooner. He apologized and switched it to the right one.
After that, Kane caught a couple of really small fish (trout and dolly varden char). I never did catch anything. I had one bite early on, but didn’t get the hook set.
All in all, a great day, I was so happy for Kane to catch a salmon, catching two was incredible. We took the fillets to a place to have them vacuum packed, as we knew we’d have about 10 lbs of fish and would not be able to eat it all in time. We had 9 lbs, and we had 7 of it processed. We ate the other 2 for dinner… chose the safe route and baked it, but next time we’ll use the grill. It was really good. Biggest surprise was when we pulled it out of the fridge to prepare it (6 hours after it was filleted), it had absolutely no smell whatsoever! Amazing!!
