Kenai West

Back to the travelogue.  We left Seward and headed north again.  When we reached the turn off to Homer, we went in that direction.  Confused?  I think I am.  Anyway you come out of the mountains and cross the width of the peninsula on a pretty good highway.  The road runs along the Kenai River, the first of those I wanted to fish.  The Kenai runs from a huge lake in mountains to the Cook Inlet and serves as the main corridor for salmon returning to most of the upper peninsula to spawn.  Along the way, it is joined by the Russian River which originates in two smaller lakes in the mountains.  Literally millions of fish travel up this river.  Alaska game and fish has sonar stations set up on the river to watch the fish and they have tracked a million fish a day!  Fishing is extremely tightly regulated and they stop and start fishing depending on how many fish have successfully made it to their spawning grounds.  The Kenai is a large river whose mouth is an estuary with a great deal of salt marsh surrounding the water.  The Russian is more like a good sized Colorado river, such as the Frypan (Memories, Steve C!).  You can fish the confluence of the two rivers which is weird, if you are fishing the Russian, you use one type of tackle and if you fish the Kenai, you use different tackle.  The Kenai tackle is illegal on the Russian and they have signs marking the legal transition.  Fishing is also divided into whether you are fishing for Sockeye salmon, a fish like a large trout, or King Salmon which are as big as 50 pounds.  You have to have a stamp to catch Kings and must write down where and when you caught each one on the back of your license in ink immediately after you catch the fish.  You think there might be game wardens wandering around?  By the way, the summary book for the fishing regulations is 92 pages of 8-1/2X11 paper.

Anyway, we drove past all this to Soldotna, AK and stayed at an RV park at the edge of the town near the Kenai River.  This is the estuary area of the river.   It was now the Thursday before July 4th, so we expected crowds.  Not so much as it turns out.

I went fishing on the Russian, but had no luck.  I found one spot where people were catching fish all day, but it turns out that they were 3 generations of one family.  One guy reminded me of Joe Carr, he caught fish when no one else did. They were good fishermen.  I tried all the stuff I had bought and then tried the rig that we have used in Michigan.  No go.  Apparently there had been a small run of fish up the river very early in the morning and I talked to two fellows who had managed to get upstream fast enough to catch up with the fish.  They had caught fish.  Catching fish here is a matter of when the tides are and what day of the year it is.  They say that if the fish are running, it doesn't matter how you fish.  I would love to see that.

I went back to Soldotna and got Pat.  We decided to get her a license and try our hand at the morning tide the next day.  We spent some time exploring river access points on the Kenai and were going to start fishing at 4:30 the next morning.  We went to Ken's Bait and Tackle and got Pat's license.  Ken was in there and was very helpful in giving us an understanding of what controls fishing in Alaska.  He also said that they were only catching trout as catch and release on the Kenai.  He recommended two places on the Kasiloff River, south of Soldotna where people had seen sockeye and king salmon.  If you ever come here to fish, go talk to them in Ken's Bait and Tackle.  The Kasiloff was one of the rivers recommended by the Fish and Game officer who sold me my license.  So we went down there to try our hand.  No luck, no fish.  And that where the seagull got Pat.  That ended fishing because we spent the rest of the day in the emergency room. 

The next day we went down to the second spot on the Kasiloff.  Pat couldn't fish, but I looked around.  No action.  It was so slow that at one spot I saw a fisherman laying on his side hugging his fly rod fast asleep.  I wish I had had my camera.  That is one picture that the Alaska Tourism Bureau would never have the courage to publish.

We did, however, find out why we had seen so few moose elsewhere.  They were all in Soldotna.  It was a regular moose-in.   We saw a total of 8 meese (?, mooses ?, moose) in three days.  We got a reasonable picture of this gal, but in other cases, it was too dark or there was too much traffic to get pictures.  Pat saw a cow moose with two calves walking in a gravel pit beside the road, but there was no hope of getting a picture. Too bad. 

Moose a la Hinz

Then there was this one on the University of Alaska campus in Soldotna.  Sort of reminds me of John Hinz's moose.


The next day we had to go back to Anchorage so we could get to the orthopedic clinic to get Pat's arm put in a cast.  As a result, we got to Anchorage on 4th of July evening.  It turns out that the pastor of the Anchorage Baptist Temple went to school with Judy.  Pat and her sisters knew them until they left Tennessee to come to Alaska.  We decided to go to church there on Sunday and heard a great sermon and enjoyed visiting with the Prevos.  We enjoyed it so much that we went back for Sunday evening service. 

Monday, was orange casting day.  Tuesday we headed out of Anchorage to Palmer on the way to Denali and Fairbanks.