You gotta be Kiddin me....

That's the first thing I said Saturday morning when I turned the computer on to check the weather and the stream flow before our very first day of cactch and keep early run Kings in 3 years. The entire Kenai River sport fishing culture was mobilised and ready to pounce... and the warm weather has made the Glacier dump muddy silt laden crap into our water. I don't believe a single salmon was caught that morning on the entire lower river. I had my good friends Tom and Nikki out and nadda...just goes to show that things don't always turn out perfect in this ol life just because you want or maybe even think you deserve them to. Here's the chart, as you can see everything was fine until Saturday. For any of you fishing this week, don't panic, nothing's forever around here and I expect it to clear, we'll know by tomorrow.

But up until Saturday when we could keep fish the catch and release fishing was great. It was sunny warm and enough fish around to make it sporty. We hooked up within the first 20 minutes 3 days in a row. Here's pic of Barb exercising a nice King Salmon.

Barb there is Ed Fogels sister in law. I've known Ed for 20 years, ever since I was on the River Board and he was a DNR planner. Now he's the Deputy Chief of the Alaska Dept. of Natural Resources which our State Park falls under the management of. Ed knows the way. He's a naturalists who know's all the birds and animals. He's an expert fly fisherman. He's a maestro at his job, he keeps the train on the tracks for Alaska's mining, oil and tourism industries....and he goes fishing with me, what a compliment. We had a great day. So thanks Ed, Lou ann and Barb for coming down, let's do it all again for slimey ol silver salmon in the fall eh ?

The day before I had their relatives out fishing and I took a short 1 minute video of one of Wayne's fishing dancing around on the surface a bit. But the coolest thing in the video I think is the feel you can get from home the early morning is crispy cool and the river quiet with no traffic that goes with catch and keep fishing. Actually it's been great and I expect the ADF+G to use catch and release to start the season next year until they see the size of the run instead of just closing it until they see the size of the run....it would only be prudent, but then when do ADF+G and the word prudent collide in the same sentence ?

I got a hot tip for any of you that have an old boat that you think you can make look new with wax and elbow grease..... DON'T ever use that Turtle Wax product that is colored to match your paint. I had black wax / dye everywhere. It was like a super fund clean up site. At one point I had the bottle on the gunwale of the boat and it fell landing perfectly hard and up right to gloop a big ol glob onto my new Nike's which I put in the sink which also turned black. The yard look liked a gorilla had used it as a dog park and MP refuses to wash my buffing pads...when it comes to a sticky substance that can make a mess it worst than Pro-Cure for salmon eggs....and that's saying something. But the boat looks nice.

I got to use my new waterproof Lumix camera...You know me, never to be deterred. We woke up to a driving rain and when you comit to walking every morning well that's what you do. Here's me and MP on the river walk, driving rain, muddy river, Sunday morning....kinda fun actually. and oh, we were the only ones out.

One last thing that I just gotta say. Here's a pic of the big fish that comes to the Kenai River Festival every year courtesy of the local commercial fishing industry. It's the first thing thousands of people see and always has a message, you might even remember last years from this this blog.  Last year it said ' King salmon drive the news, Red salmon drive the economy'..... These people just gotta keep pushing. It's like running into Eddie Haskell every day, bla, bla, bla, bla....and how are you Mrs. Clever ?....It's like having a Michael Jordan interview on continuous loop telling you how great he is. It's a little bit like Airport music...it sucks and you can't get away from it. So, I'm not sure what this sign means but I think it means support all the fisheries, even the ones that catch all the salmon you might want to have just one of.....whatever it means or you guys over there think it means...CUT IT OUT....we're tired of it.