Great Alaskan Road Trip: Week 12 Roundup

Each Friday, I post some relevant (and not-so-relevant) stats about the trip, as well as a little write-up of what it’s like to live out of a van for weeks on end. Here’s where we are overall:

• Total miles driven: 7477
• Total miles by ferry: 489
• Total days on the road: 81
• Total nights in a hotel: 4
• Total miles hiked: 96.04

Here are some interesting stats for this week:

• Fuel stops: 0
• Technical issues: 0
• National Park Service sites visited: 1 – Kenai Fjords National Park
• Bears sighted: 0
• Whales sighted: 5 humpbacks, 30+ orcas
• Salmon caught: 4 sockeye/reds

The Kenai and Russian rivers are world-renowned for their salmon runs.  Since we are in the area, we wanted to give it a try for ourselves.  The visitor center in Soldotna has a trophy of the world record largest king salmon ever caught – a monster at 97 lbs, 4 ounces.  Even though we are too late this year to get in on the king salmon run (June/July) we were feeling encouraged.

Since we didn’t have any gear or experience we hired a guide to take us out on the river for a half day.  It was an early start for us – 5 a.m.  The days are shorter now, so it was actually dark when we woke up.

We spent a few minutes figuring out how to put on the hip waders (the world’s least sexy thigh-high boot), and climbed into the boat to go to our guide’s “primo spot”.  Our guide explained that we would be fishing for sockeye (also called “reds”) today, even though it was near the end of their run.  (Coho, or silvers, don’t really start running until next week).  The salmon are born in freshwater, spend a few years feeding in the river, go out to sea for another few years, and then eventually return en masse to their birthplace to spawn and die.  Anglers from all over the world come to the Kenai peninsula to take advantage of the “easy pickings”.

By the time they are swimming upriver to spawn the sockeye have pretty much stopped eating, which means that they won’t go for bait on a hook.  Instead, the concept behind catching them is to toss a weighted line into the water with a three or four foot leader attached to an un-baited hook.  You then sort of bob the weight along the river bottom, pulling the leader and hook taut.  The fish swim with their mouths open, so if you’re lucky you’ll get one to swim right into the line and catch it across its mouth.  Once it does, you give the line a quick pull and – hopefully – you’ve snagged the fish in the mouth (anywhere else and you have to throw it back).  I know, it doesn’t seem very sporting, does it?

I am not much of a fisherman.  But I’d always imagined fishing was supposed to be all about relaxing while your hook sat in the water and caught fish.  For me, today was anything but relaxing – I was constantly in motion, tossing the line in and dragging it along, then ripping it (catching nothing), and tossing it into the river again.  My shoulders will be feeling sore for the next few days, I’m sure.  Anyway, we could definitely tell it was the end of the run because no one was catching much of anything.  The limit per day is six, and Kevin and I had been all excited thinking that we’d end up with six keepers each, maybe 60 lbs or more of salmon to take home.  Ha!  We caught just four fish total, and the guide said one of them was literally the smallest sockeye he’d ever seen (1 lb).  So we learned the hard way that if you really want to catch salmon, you have to be here during the peak of the run.  During the height of the 2012 season, over 100,000 sockeye were swimming up the river per day; on the day we fished only about 20,000 were running – so I guess we were lucky to get our four. 

Sign summing up Alaska’s wildlife management philosophy

We’ll be going home with about 15 lbs of filets, so at least we’ve got something to show for it.  But considering the cost of the guide, the cost of the processing/smoking/freezing, and the cost of shipping it home this is undoubtedly the most expensive salmon we’ve ever bought.