Sea Trials

As you can see from the USGS graph to the side there is plenty of water this spring in the Kenai River. The asterisk are the 40 year average. But every year people in town wait and watch for somebody to be the first to safely navigate up and down the lower river, that's usually me. So yesterday its time, me and Jet have to run from mile 14 to the sonar site at mile 8. I always do this first cruise alone, the boats light and Jet can't rat me out if I do something stupid and fetch up on a rock.

Theres 3 places where you have to be right on. The first is right below my house at Stewarts Island. Theres a nice little drop there as the river channels next to the island. I idle up 1/4 mile above it in the deep water below Big Eddy to get the boat perfectly trimmed and at 3/4 throttle I fly right through it....but I do feel the boat 'lift' a bit as the pressure from the boat pushes against the bottom. Its 2 1/2 feet deep. The next is only a short ways downriver. Its as Fall-in-Hole opens up next to the gravel bar I was walking on in a few posts back. Theres no real channel here so you use your experience to pick a line and commit to it, again, clean up on step. This is a spot that at low water you can look behind the boat if you have the courage and see that your props stirring the bottom and leaving a trail. Its small gravel here. I have no problem and zip on down river past the Pillars where our local Park Ranger is launching a Boat with a jet unit on it so I give him a big wave and pic the right line for the 3rd trouble spot. The river goes left and I skirt a rock right above RiverWood subdivision. Then I kind of arc the boat around the easily seen gravel bar above the Toilet Hole and at the very end I run right between 2 rocks that have showed me the deep water for 30 years now. The boat now breaks into the Eagle Rock area where the river changes from rock and gravel to tidal area mud. You can certainly hit bottom from here down but as its mud the pressure is off....it can't really hurt the boat to bad. So I run past Beaver Creek to Mud Island then into the deep water at the Sonar site and throw out the anchor, pour some coffee and read the paper as I watch my rod with a QwikFish Lure on it dance. I've got our local call in show on the radio and they're talking about the oil spill, lessons learned in Alaska.

After fishing all of an hour Jet and I back track up the river. We stop and salvage a bit at several spots. Its a day that I only see one other boat, the Park Ranger with two Coast Guardsman in the jet boat doing training I suppose...even though they're jet equipped they'll learn the river the same way we all do, I call it the braille method.
Behind my house I have a fish hanging and cleaning station. to make it interesting I have a display of all my salvaged goodies. The first pic here is my pile of anchors, the holy grail for marine salvagers. Its amazing to me how many people can't tie a knot. These are generally found with no rope attached and I've found many, this year the count was 3. But the coolest thing I've ever salvaged is this Palm Tree. Yup, that's a real, used to be living Palm Tree. What it was doing in the Kenai River I have no idea but I like to think it was teleported back from Mexico with me. Its my own little piece of Mazatlan right here at Mile 14.

The last pic is what we find the most of , pliers and knives. Releasing fish can be a tricky deal and all of us have dropped their share of pliers in the river. But I finally have a nice pair of stainless pliers (that I found in the river) with a rope lanyard attached.


So with sea trials complete its time to get into the season. The World record King Salmon was caught here on May 17th.....I'm thinking we might not catch a 98 pounder but I wouldn't bet against us catching two 35 pounders.

Stay tuned and thanks for reading. We recently passed 5000 reads. Wow. As the season goes on I'll post about daily life on the Kenai, here at Mile 14.