Its a Record !

The other day was Friday the 13th and we here at mile 14 were perfectly positioned to take full advantage of it and set a new record for consecutive days with rainfall. The previous record was 35 days so on Friday at about 6:30 pm as I was barbecuing steaks the toad strangler hit and we were on the board. And you know we do things big around here and aren't going to just settle for beating the record by a day or so, I have confidence that with the current forecast we can hit 40 days. This pic above I took yesterday morning. It kind of shows you how unsettled the weather has been, its sunny and cloudy all at the same time....weird. But you know me, theres always a bright side, life wouldn't make sense if there weren't . So at Mile 14 the nice thing about all the rain is our bonanza mushroom crop and my guideboat is self cleaning, not a bad trade off I'd say. MP could tell you what all the mushrooms are and just what your chances are if you were to eat them. But me, I just think they're pretty. In the last pic you can see a whole crop of little brown guys, kind of budget Shaggy Manes.

But what we lack in sunshine we make up for with fish. The Kenai River is plug full of Pink and Silver salmon like this nice limit catch that Orville and Allan are holding. Yesterday we anchored at Eagle Rock and were kind of 'oneing' the silvers, one here, one there. I got a bit antsy and decided to look upriver and we managed to catch one more in the Big Eddy but at 1 pm we only had 3. I moved the boat one last time to a nice looking little seam that I'd never fished before and walla...4 silvers in 20 minutes. Thats a pretty good trick when you consider the way those buggers nibble a bait, I often say that to catch 8 silvers you need 30 bites. I don't think theres a sportfish in the world or at least that I've found that gets off the hook any easier than a Silver Salmon.

We also have Pink salmon, no fishing report would be complete without mentioning our abundant run of RainBow salmon...Humpies. This last pic is of me with a Kenai narly, sorry about the darkness but ah....it was raining. The males have the hump and its cartilage, the females are actually quite nice fish and when fresh have a nice mild salmon taste. They only run on even numbered years in the Kenai which is kind of odd as in other places of the state they run every year. They also are the only salmon that doesn't rear in the river. The eggs hatch out and they go to sea coming back by the thousands 2 years later. When I first started guiding I treated the Pinks like a nuisance but through the years I've come look forward to humpy years, we always....always....catch something. If you want to catch fish until it bores you a good humpy spin cast session is just what you need. When throwing spinners my rule of humpy/silver is 14 to 1, catch 14 pinks and a silver will arrive. Catch a silver on the first cast when the pinks are around and prepare to go to work, you've got alot of humpys to work through to get the odds back in your favor.