Rainbow Trout Fishing on the Kenai River
When we woke up for day two, Joe and I both wondered how in the hell we were going to top day one at Wolverine Creek. I don’t just mean on the trip to Alaska. I mean EVER.
For our second day we were catching up with our guide for the trip who helped coordinate everything for us, Jeff Moore of Wet & Wild Charters. One of my friend’s dad had lived in Alaska for a while and he knew of Jeff from his time up there. We had talked to Jeff earlier in the year and told him what kind of trip we wanted to do and he lined up a wide range of things for us to do during our week there.
I’ll say this, I’m from Florida. When I say that I mean that I thought we had the most intrusive mosquitoes on earth. My opinion of that changed in the minutes before we met up with Jeff at the boat ramp on the Kenai River. I sat down to tie my shoe and was immediately accosted by a swarm of mosquitoes including one that flew into my mouth (which much to my dismay I swallowed) as well as one that went straight up my nose. Thank God that when we saw Jeff he hooked us up with some bug spray which I figured out that along with rain gear (at all times) it was a necessity in Alaska.
The Kenai River is just a beautiful place. While the run in the morning was a pretty chilly one, the ride was a short one to where we were to start fishing. This day we were targeting Rainbow Trout, which Jeff had told us were catch and release.
Admittedly, I’m not much of a trolling guy. I much prefer to fish where I can cast and feel like I’m part of the action that gets the fish to bite. As I found out a pretty darn effective way to catch them is to troll into the current on the river and slowwwwwly back down the current while trolling a crankbait. The three of us that were fishing were using a small crankbait in three different colors. It didn’t take long before we were hooked up.
From what Jeff said a trophy rainbow trout is a 10 lb fish and by that standard we had a pretty damn good day. We consistently were caching 4-5 lb rainbows and had several in the 6-8 lb range. They are really amazing fish to catch and the coloring on them is remarkable to see the variance in the same body of water. The green/red crankbait throughout the day was so money that we were taking turns with it. The other colors caught too but that green/red was getting hammered throughout the whole day.
One of the highlights from the day was actually a really awesome moment after we had caught a trout. Jeff actually had remarked to us how the fish had been hooked in a way that he thought it might not make it. When we released it, he had said to keep an eye downstream of us and see if it pops back up. Sure enough it did and not seconds later a bald eagle came and swooped down on the fish and grabbed it with his talons. The eagle had gone into the water to grab the fish so it wasn’t able to make it out the water and actually swam across the river to the other side, which I had no clue eagles could do.
This is the kind of stuff that makes Alaska just absolutely amazing. I’m telling you, it’s just constant how you are in awe of nature in this place.
