King Salmon Fishing on the Kenai River (well…kind of)
Day three was upon us and when you are in Alaska in July it is inherently difficult to sleep. There is about three hours of “night” during this time of year and I would probably consider it more like what I would call dusk. Nothing a few crown and cokes couldn’t take care of but if you ever go to Alaska, plan on learning to adjust to it being full daylight at midnight.
Our guide Jeff was again taking us on the Kenai River but today we were supposed to fish for King Salmon. My understanding previous to the trip was that the kings really start running in the rivers in the early to mid-July timeframe. From what Jeff said they have ways of tracking the volume of kings that make their way into the river. There are buoys that we passed at one point that apparently have sonar capabilities and provide their fish and wildlife people with data on how many fish are entering a river system. This helps them determine what to do to effectively manage a species on a body of water.
One thing about Alaska fishing is that there seem to be a ton of specific rules for recreational fisherman that change frequently as you travel on a particular body of water. Certain types of lures/techniques can/can not be used in certain places, certain types/sizes of engines can/can not be used, limits change for each body of water within the same species, and so on and so one. I’m glad we had Jeff to help navigate all of these rules. I can’t imagine how anybody could do it without a guide.
I knew the day was off to a rocky start when Jeff told us that we’d be trolling (again) for the kings and that the TOTAL number of kings that had entered the Kenai River to that point in the year was around 850 total for the ENTIRE YEAR. I’m not great at some things but I’m pretty quick at figuring out the probability of us catching a fish that has hardly started migrating into a body of water amongst a plethora of other fisherman trying to do the exact same thing. Everywhere we went there were several other boats. As we fished for a while, there was almost no action from any of the other boats around us as we waited for a bite.
One thing Jeff explained as we sat talking to each other in 50 degree temperature for hours upon hours was that there are commercial net operations that take place outside of the mouths of some of the rivers and those commercial nets often catch species that are unintended (like the king salmon) and cause many fish to die. The migration of these fish seems to be significantly impacted by the commercial pressures at the mouths of the rivers. Jeff said by this time of the year, there should be thousands of fish coming into the Kenai River each day and it was just simply no where near that volume.
While I didn’t get the satisfaction of catching a King Salmon (I had one single bite from something), I did squeeze in about 6 naps of varying lengths which helped make up for the lack of sleep and extradition of crown royal from my body.
Kudos to Joe for at least getting us one sockeye salmon, which I was happy we lucked into.
Listen ya’ll that is fishing some days and when you are planning a trip months ahead you hope for the best and sometime it’s just not going to work out. We still had a great day, saw some great scenery, ate ton of boat snacks, and excessively napped so it is truly all good. Joe and I did have another day of King Salmon fishing ahead of us on Saturday so we had some thinking to do on that one.
When we got back to the cabin, we both were on the same page. If the kings weren’t in the river yet, we might as well try to pivot to another type of activity. Since we had such a great time on the 1st day with the flyout, we called Alaska Air West and they had an opening for another flyout trip to a different lake on Saturday. When you travel on these kinds of trips it is great when the people you are with are willing to make adjustments like that because they can be unbelievably great decisions but more on that in two more articles. Cue the Katy Perry music because we are off to go deep sea fishing tomorrow. You’ll see what I’m talking about in the next article.
