Alaska Bound - Alaska Fly Fishing
I have some time this morning before our Beaver bush float plane takes us into Karta Lake for a week of salmon fishing, so I thought I’d post an update. Thank God we allowed ourselves an extra day on the ground here before heading out. Not only did it take a good while to load up on essentials and get all our stuff organized, but unfortunately one of my two bags went to Hong Kong courtesy of Air Canada, and won’t make it here until later today. Of course it has things like all my flies and reels and boots etc in it, so not having it to go into the bush was just not an option. I must say the folks at Alaska Airlines have been superb in helping me find it, a sad contrast to the Air Canada ineptitude.
Anyway, onwards. I’ve cobbled together enough stuff to be able to fish until the bag arrives (thanks to a great local fly shop) and, if all goes as planned, gets dropped off to me at our camp by float plane tomorrow.
What a neat place Ketchikan is. Small seaport clinging to the sides of the mountains rising up from the sea, part of the so-called Inner Passage. It’s now much dependent on tourism, and there are believe or not 3-4 cruise liners stopping in here every day. They disgorge their throngs into the shops that line the docks, and then they leave at night for another port further north.
You can usually tell the tourists from the locals, because the locals all wear either camo hats or shorty rubber boots.
By the way, I did learn about bells and pepper smelling scat for the bears. They sell the bear bells and pepper spray here to people like me headed out into the bush for the first time. Finding it in scat I suppose is a testament to its reputed ineffectiveness !!
Saw a couple of guys fly fishing for pink salmon yesterday just 5 minutes from town. Actually they were mostly trying to hook up with Cohos, but the pinks kept getting in the way. One guy said he got over 50 pinks in 6 hours. That’s believable, because you could see them thick as fleas migrating up the little river. Here, they call it a creek.
So later this afternoon we’ll be on our river, looking for Cohos ourselves. Or maybe some rainbows, or sea-run Dollies or Cutthroats. If a few pinks get in the way, well that’s Alaska….
Alaska Fly Fishing….washed out !
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