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These are the Chronicles of Famous Surf Writer Ben Marcus and his trip into the Wilds of the Alaskan Frontier.
Latest Update:
October 10, 2000

9:56 ALASKA TIME ROOM 103 OF THE KENAI PRINCESS HOTEL

Shit, it's snowing. I thought I was going fishing today. That's why I opted to stay around the Kenai River and stay in a fancy hotel. I was going to take a drift boat up or down the Kenai today and catch some big rainbows. I feel asleep with visions of blue skies and multi-color rainbows dancing in my head. Woke up, and it's gray and white.

Bugger it. The snow is falling, the sky is gray and I'm watching TV.

Yesterday fooled me into today. Yesterday was pretty spectacular all the way around, although not even perfect weather allowed me to catch a steelhead.

Driving out of Homer, I got the full panorama of sea and sky and mountains. It was a cold, crystal clear day, and there were snow-covered volcanos poking up all over the place.

The sun was shining, and I thought for sure that this was the day to finally catch a steelhead.

I stopped at that bridge over the Anchor River and fished there for a while, but nothing.

Then I went to the Bridge Hole on the Anchor, and flailed that with a few others. Nothing.

Then I went down to the mouth of the Anchor, where I had seen that gypsy camp with the sled dogs a few days ago. This time, my timing was perfect. The tide was way in and the estuary was full of water. It was a flawless blue day, and the mountains of the Aleutian Chain, on the other side of Cook Inlet, looked like Valhalla.

I pulled up next to the gypsy camp and pulled out my fly rod and began flailing. This time, the resident of the gypsy camp was around. His name was Scotty and he was a transplant from Pennsylvania who had come to Alaska five years before and never left. He had been living at that spot at the end of the Anchor River for several years, and was nice enough to share some Local Knowledge.

"You might want to come up this way. There's a channel right through here, and then a little island the fish bounce off. You might have better luck."

So I moved where he said, but pretty soon I would learn he was just being nice.

"You can see the fish when they're moving," Scotty said. "They put up a bow wake and you just cast in front of that."

I knew that from fishing the Sooes. Today there weren't any bow wakes, just the occasional plop from a rising Dolly Varden.

"Oops, there goes one, heading back out to sea!" Scotty shouted, and I turned to see a bow wake going the other way. I cast at it, but Scotty just chuckled.

So I got into a conversation with Scotty, as he drank beer and talked to his dogs. Scotty had the place wired. He said summer was the time to be there, when there were tourists and fishermen everywhere, but also a lot of fish. Scotty would sit with his buddies in their hillbilly gypsy camp with their crude, monofilament line rigs while yuppies flailed the water with thousand dollar rigs. They'd see fish moving, put down their beers, throw in their monofilament, snag a fish, chortle at the yuppies, then go back to their beers.

"Drove them crazy," Scotty claimed.

I could imagine.

Scotty had only seen one bear in all his time on the Anchor River, a black bear scuttling away, off in the distance.

Scotty reckoned that if you were going to be poor, might as well be poor in a beautiful place. I agreed with that.

Scotty had hitch-hiked all over Alaska, but spent most of his time in the gypsy camp at the mouth of the Anchor River, with his dogs and his beer and his million-dollar view.

He said that I was a little late in the season for the big steelhead and red salmon runs, and that I owed it to myself to come back in the summer, when all of those things were happening.

"I personally pulled 200 kings out of this river myself," Scotty claimed.

He offered me a beer, but I declined. If I'm going to stay in Alaska, I'd better learn to like that stufff. I'm becoming unsociable.

I left and poked around in a couple of Anchor River holes, but there were fishermen everywhere, and it kind of lost its flavor.

So I pushed on to Deep Creek, and went down to the mouth there. This time there wasn't even a Scotty around. It was just me and a hundred yards of slow-moving river, heading out to sea. I didn't see any bow wakes, but I didn't care. I just cast and drift all the way to the mouth, where I got another million dollar view of Redoubt Volcano, and another volcano that I can't spell.

And then I gave up. No steelhead for Ben this year. Don't know what I was doing wrong. Maybe nothing. Catching a steelhead comes with experience and patience and luck, and I guess I didn't invest enough of both this time.

So I drove out, past the Ninilchik, into Kenai, through Soldotna and onto the highway that runs along the Kenai River. This is a river designed by God of the Chamber of Commerce. The Kenai is just a classic: trees, mountains, snow, rapids, turquoise water, bald eagles. The works.

Along the way, I saw a pretty bad accident. Someone had run their black truck into a ditch, and it looked totaled. There were cops and a a tow truck and I wondered about the driver.

That reminded me of another wreck I had seen another day. A giant trailer-home had veered off the highway, and would need a crane to get it out.

Near Cooper Landing I saw more police cars pulled off to the side, and as I approached I caught a glimpse of black. Someone had hit a black bear with their truck. The bear was dead, and there was a grinning hillbilly with the hood of his truck up and open, checking for damage.

Poor Yogi. Never hurt anyone.

The Kenai looked too good to resist. You should have seen it all in the evening. At Cooper Landing I called Alaska Troutfitters to ask if they had any trips going out. They suggested I call back in the morning.

While driving along I saw the Kenai Princess on the other side of the river. It was a lodge and an RV park, so I thought I might find a place to eat dinner, watch Monday Night Football and stay for the night.

The Kenai Princess is semi-fancy for around here. I had turkey/vegetable soup in the bar while watching Tampa Bay and Minnesota on Monday Night Football.

The bartender turned out to be very knowledgable about fishing. He had caught 13 steelhead on the Anchor River a week ago, but he had been doing it for years, and had techniques. He used only monofilament line, which was something that Scotty suggested.

"Those steelhead are real smart," the bartender said. "They'll see one of those orange or green or yellow fly lines coming at them, and they'll bolt. I've seen times where I wasn't catching anything on eight-pound monofilament, and went down to six-pound and started nailing them. You have to put in some time with steelhead, but once you catch the first one, a little lightbulb goes on over your head, and it gets easier from there."

I asked about drifting the Kenai the next day, and The Bartender said go for it. So I checked into another fancy hotel room, and fell asleep thinking "Kill trout on the morrow." (Hey, I wanted to stay in the RV park, but it was closed. All of this part of Alaska is closing.)

It is the morrow, and it is snowing outside. The trout are safe, not that they were in much danger from me, anyway.

No fishing the Kenai today. But I shall return.

Off to Anchorage now. Need my tide chart to figure out when the bore will be coming through.

I think I better get out of Alaska in a hurry. The weather is about to get really bad.

No, the weather already is really bad.

Next year, I'll have a Humvee.

 

 


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