As close as you can get to being here

This year our river has behaved strangely. All year long we've had high water after high water event with the latest one coming in October when the river is usually low and slow.  Of course the more water there is the faster it runs and the faster it runs the longer it takes to freeze. Well its been so cold lately that even with the high water the freezing process has begun here at Mile 14. About 4 days ago we had pan ice floating onto the shallows at Fall-in-Hole, pretty soon the pan ice was all across the river and by the hour it was raising here as the water backed up behind the ice dam downriver.  Pretty soon it got to where it was nothing but ice and it was all standing still, quiet and settled in for the winter....or so we thought.  We were in the sauna for about an hour and when I was drying off I could here the weirdest 'whooshing' sound, and it was loud.

As soon as my glasses went fog free I could see that the head pressure had gotten to the breakable point and all the reserved ice was flushing downriver, fast and loud. I ran to the house and got the camera and recorded the video. It was much louder at first but its still pretty cool, shows the power of the river and what I tell people all the time......its a living thing, just like us. If you can't hear it turn your volume up. Now, two days later its pretty much settled in again and maybe this time for good. We were going to walk on it today but the upper crust is still to soft and you break through. So just like Thanksgiving day we've been doing our walking in town where I took these pics on t-day morning about 10 am, temperature -6.

It wouldn't be Soldotna if you didn't run into a few fish while out on your walk. I also snapped this pic of MP after she'd fixed her drooping socks, is that pic cute or what? She was just slightly fogged up.

And the local High School art class was good enough to paint the retaining wall with our location, so me and MP might not act like it....but we're never lost.

Hows about that, my first ever video blog up link. Theres lots of possibilities that go with this video deal, my buddy Ernie surf fishing a schamoozle. Or Slah rattling on in his Arabic laced Spanish language after losing whats always the biggest fish of the year....lots of possibilities.

wheres the Beach?

That picture I took tells the story, I'm firmly standing  in the snow while my mind is walking barefoot on the beach. This Alaska is something and I know I shouldn't complain about the weather as my niece Melonie is having Thanksgiving in Fairbanks with a record cold spell of being in the - 40's...but....In the last three weeks that this blog has taken its trip down memory lane the weather here  has been horrible. We've had 2 hurricane force wind events so its either blowing, or snowin, or colder than hell.

That's the biggest flag in Soldotna, standing straight out a few days ago. For 40 years our local Chevy Dealer anchored the business community in this town. Well, like a lot of small towns we lost it when GM figured they would cut back on 'marginal' dealerships. Small towns like ours are now without the guys who always
sponsored the Kick Off Basketball tournaments all around America. But...back to the wind. Here at Stewarts Landing it uprooted at least a dozen trees. I guess because the ground is good and frozen that the week spot was there and it turned them over just like this below.

So in the spring I have a ton of work to do. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother one time. I was telling   about the Spruce Bark Beetle infestation that went through here about 10 years ago and I was saying that we had so many dead trees that I could spend the rest of my life cutting them and never get them all. He kind of responded with "wow, you have that much property?" and I said heck no.....but we sure got that many trees. So below you see a pic of MP's brand spanking new , state of the art, high tech and slightly smashed greenhouse. The tree that got it was just huge but we;re always lucky as it came just feet from a direct hit that would have taken out both greenhouses as well as the fence around the garden....my moe-joe is still working.

But I'm not one to miss the natural beauty of nature showing its force. I don't know what they're really called but as a kid they were 'snow snakes' to us and something you very seldom see in Alaska. Around here the snow comes straight down but the other day, oh baby, was it moving around.

The next pic we've seen a zillion times. I never get tired of it, right here at Mile 14 and its -15 in the low light of morning, Jet-dogs with me and I try to get a pic of her trying to stand and walk with the least amount of legs touching the ground....but I can't get the pic, next time.

The last pic answers a question I get often while fishing...." where do all the eagles go in the winter?" Well, that's a pretty good chunk of them right there at the South Soldotna mini mall...or to some people, the dump.

Me and MP wish everybody a happy and especially healthy Thanksgiving....I'll get on the beach real soon so please, keep coming back and I'll get some exciting fish stories and pics up on the blog, Mile 14.

The JourneyMan

I  was going to follow up the apprentice blog with this one and got a bit side tracked last week, a little a.d.d. don't ya know. But it was in the 1990's that I came of age with the guiding, I had my Honda sponsorship, I was President of the Guide Association and it was time to secure my spot as a top guide on the Kenai River.

Always being one to do things myself I really never had anybody to mentor me and I certainly never had somebody really really good to show me. But I did keep my eyes open and wasn't afraid to try new things. I got to thinking that this river is so well fished that I got to doubting that a King Salmon could swim up this river without seeing a lure. So, what makes him bite this one, or that one? How can you make your lure look or be different ?( after all, every kwikfish and spin-glo looks the same) So I boiled it down to two no brainer things, boating skills and bait. I started experimenting with different scents for my eggs and I lucked into the secret of finding good sardines for the trolled lures.....we're catching a lot of fish so with that goes more eggs for bait which means we use more which means more bites which means....well, we were on our way. To this day I'm convinced that  well scented fresh eggs are 75% of success, people used to think we were lucky, well, people who work hard get awful lucky.  And I don't mean simply applying the scent to the eggs, I cure them with the scent. Not only do we change the bait super often but I also go through great pains off the river to make sure the curing process is just right. I've heard guides judge a good egg by its ability to stay on the hook or its color to the human eye.....mmmmm.....a good egg is one that catches a fish if you ask me. If you don't think I was into it just check out those Carharts I'm wearing in the pic below.

In 1990 my friend Greg Davis of King Louies Guide Service was keeping his boat at a friends dock who had built some cabins for fishermen to stay and was working to get the business started. Greg invited me down to share the dock and then he quit guideing. Well, I missed Greg as he just might be the funnest guy who's ever ran the Kenai but it was good fit for me and I stayed many years,  even after we bought the boat launch....you know how I am about loyalty. The pic below is the dock with the Honda boat and Vinces boat who is one of the guides I helped get going back in that era. In my boat is a special group, my cousin Larry Rannals and one of the fishiest people I've ever met, Gene Putman.

Even though the cabins were a 6 mile drive farther than I was used to it was a pretty nice situation. The owners didn't sell fishing trips and I didn't sell accommodations so working in unison it made for a great value for our customers. We got to be friends with the owners and having been guiding now for well over 10 years I had a pretty good customer base so I even had a second boat working. We bought Stewarts Landing in 1996 and in hind sight I guess I should have kept my boat here at Mile 14 but I felt like MP should run the boat launch without my everyday imput and I was happy where I was, always am. But in the early 2000's I started to sense some strangeness with the owners. I don't really to this day know what it was but I guess theres a certain natural resentment that occurs with all the success, no success, familiarity, ambitions....and unlike me and my life, a lot of peoples lives are always changing. On the day my dad died I got a call from the owner complaining about customers parking...although I waited until the end of the season, it was clearly time to move on.

So the next year I stayed put, right here at Mile 14 and let me tell you, I had no idea what I was missing. Life got waaaaaay simpler. I got extra sleep in the morning, I drive my 4-wheeler to work, no trailering the boat, no driving the truck, my own gutting tables, walla. The pic above is Craig Humphries and friends, the Alaska sign brought to us by John Iverson, pretty cool eh?  So by the early 2000's I'd been in the same boat for 20 years and although the old Minnow 3 was good to go I felt like if I was going to guide for another 20 years a fresh boat might be in order. Most of the guide boats on the Kenai are Willie brand boats but I'd had such good luck with Alumaweld I wanted to stay so I searched out this 1998 Super Vee. The biggest change was going from a steering console to the tiller handle and from Honda to Yamaha. She's a 21 footer and with all the walk around room and plush seats about as comfortable as you can get.

As I said earlier, I really think boating control is huge part of success in our fishery and I was bit concerned about running the tiller. And so I should have been...it was plane hard on my back the first few years but the actual learning to control the boat was easy. The tiller is so much more responsive than the wheel and I never felt uncomfortable with it. Here's a pic of my friend Brandon Greene with one of the first very large models that we got in the Minnow 4.

Is that gorgeous or what? Below is a pretty cool pic of my friend Steve Wendt hunkered over in battle. Steve's a local guy who treats himself to a trip with me every year for the last 15.  What a cool thing to have friends like Steve and Sally Brook who's summer wouldn't be the same without a trip with me. We know each others kids, we talk politics....its what my fishing has become....comfortable and relaxed, sincere and steady. Thanks you guys ....all of you.

Sally was with me this last year when my throat locked up and I was off to emergency surgery. So Sal, in 2012 I'm leaving the boiled eggs at home and we'll make it through the ENTIRE fishing trip, I promise.  I'll end this blog with a pic that my Friend Marty Holloran took in my boat in the mid 1980's. Marty has an eye for art and the unusual I'd say. Its something I try to live by, you have to have goals and to get them you have to be positive....so in that light and seeings as in the last few blogs I've recounted 30 years on the river I thought I should also announce the future, my retirement date....2025, I'll be 70 years old. Ya gotta have goals , right? We'll leave the light on.

Answers Given

A week of two away from the 2nd anniversary of this blog I figure I have about 100 regular readers and another fifty to 75 sometime readers....and that's cool by me. But compared to internetdom its a modest group which I think of as kind of intimate, maybe more personal. So, I'm going to take a risk here and blog something that I've wanted to for some time now.  I guess I shouldn't really worry about revealing too much of myself, after all I'm a guy who plays music for the masses and once blogged a pic of myself in a speedo...but still, this is personal. I think you'll like it and maybe see some reflections in your own lives, I hope so.

As you know 10 days after my 20th birthday I was trapped under a boat with my friend Steve Blossom, he died. I guess like most losses the people left behind have so many questions, ones to do with the hereafter and their own mortality. I spent years and years wondering all of the what if's , hours of agonising over what could have been if it just wasn't for...that. I had heartbreak, I had seen the other side, I had guilt, I had, well....I bet a lot of you know. But the biggest question,  the one that after all the other  things had fatigued in my mind remained was this, WOULD WE STILL BE FRIENDS ? 

Well, about 8 months ago the answer came in a round about way. My sister in Oregon was going through her stuff and found this old blue book of poetry, written by Steve Blossom. After his death his parents compiled and printed it and then inscribed a copy to Karen and Woody. They never had any contact with me.  So below are two poems, the first Steve wrote and the second I wrote after the accident . I just scanned them onto the blog and they might be hard to read....but that rawness I think is part of the story. I could have just re typed them but, well this is better. If you can't read them just click on them to enlarge with your own computer.

It   all   seems so similar and of course we know that friends have similar interests, similar passions, similar views of life, similar hobbies.   I know as far as resolution goes this might not be much, but its all I'm going to get , I think maybe its more than a lot of people get. So, after 38  years .....we're moving on, finally.

The Apprentice

That's me and my first King Salmon ever, the start of a lifetime of learnin, laughin and depleting the chinook salmon resource on the Kenai Pennisula. That fish might not look like much to you but it was a big day in my life, I had caught silver salmon in the early 70's but that King right there signaled me that those babies are darn hard to catch and this whole whack em and stack em deal was going to take some hard work and an investment in technology. Technology like that spankin new 78 Dodge Power Wagon in the background. Today I kind of role my eyes up at the young guys who show up at our boat launch with a brand new Willie Boat being pulled by a brand new F-150....well, I guess I was that guy to. I bought that truck from My friend Kenny Cooper in Missoula Montana for 5200 bucks, its the only new truck I've ever had.....

Thats 1979 and that guy on the right was one of the reasons I got to guiding. We had an apartment on the river where I kept the first Minnow (the apartment building is now a fishing lodge) so me and my buddy Dan (Stergio) Sterchi would take our boss John Manson fishing. John was  a hard man to work for, when he was around you'd best be humping it but when he found out I had the boat his view of me changed. On Friday afternoons he's pay me 4 hours regular time and 2 hours overtime and we'd go fishing, my first dollar, I felt like I was doing something illegal...

My first big King. My friend Paul Kelley took this pic beside our apartment at 4 am on a July Saturday. Paul lost his hand in a sawmill accident and when he netted this fish it was...well....the outcome was in doubt. 
We had this fish and another just about as big and let me tell you, I was PUMPED....

My first 'real' boat, a 16 foot Klamath deluxe. This is one fishing machine and to this day I tell new Alaskans if you want a 'do everything' boat buy one of those babies right there. Max there in the foreground is now 31 years old and my Dad there passed away a few years back...he looks kind of proud doesn't he? This boat the Minnow 2 opened my eyes to adventure and it saw lots and lots and lots of pescado like this catch of Halibut below.

Me and Stergio, Gary Allison and  his boss Gerald. I personally caught the big halibut and it was my first time to shoot-harpon-gaff a monster...I got in a fight in Townsend Montana one time with a cowboy who wasn't as tough as that fish.

Joe Hanes told me one time I might be the best silver guide on the river, well, we've been chasing em for a while. Me and my dad and Woody on the right, that's a pretty big silver he's holding, the guy with his fly open is my old friend Bill Bertram, who's still around the Kenai area. Off to he right you see part of an old Datsun truck I had, Budget Charters coming your way. We routinely towed to Deep Creek with the Datsun and would launch in the River on the tide and return in 2 hours while there was still tide to enter the river, it was way simpler than the new tractor system they have now....

That would be my running partner with a nice King salmon. You'll notice a kitchen chair in the boat and that improvised PVC pipe rod holder, that's how Budget Charters got its moniker. At this point of my career I was obsessed with harvest and catching so things like comfort and safety kind of took a back seat to the fishing. On the console was my self taught bait system, thread to make old slimey hold onto the eggs a bit longer.

She's still that gorgeous and smiles just as readily.  As you can see she's helping me work on the patience part of guideing...whats the matter with all this line?....did you buy the cheap *^$# again?....how come I always get the bad reel ?....That pic was actually taken in the boat I had to have, the boat that came to be the 'million dollar' boat that I bought for 8200 dollars from Skip Hoskins, we finalised the deal at the Maverick Club.

I spent 20 guide season in her, a 20 foot Alumaweld Guide Special with a 90 horse Merc and a 25 horse Kicker. Now we had the right tool, now we're going to get some work done. The Minnow 3 is low to the water so she doesn't catch much air when trolling, she's 5 feet wide for walk around stability and with the jet shoe on it it runs in 6 inches of water. I had Gary Allsion do a custom paint job on it and it looked as fast  as it was.

Thats Ed Waslh in the stearn of guidebat 003. The motor was Mercury's 'tower of power' a gas guzzleing in line 6 cylinder. To this day I'm always way early for my fishing trips and I think I learned that from that Mercury....that thing took forever to start. It had an actual starting procedure that if not followed would mean a flooded motor and a half hour wait....pump the bulb to hard, (it didn't have a choke but instead a direct fuel pump) push the fuel plunger 6 times and make sure the motor is in a perfectly down position, turn the key, pray.....

That pic of my old friend Ray Lavalee and his buddy Joe was taken right here at Stewarts Landing, Mile 14 Kenai River Alaska. I'll never forget this day as it was Memorial day and the river was packed with both people and fish. As you can see the boat now has a Johnson 35 horse and a 15 kicker thanks to the State Parks horsepower limit regulation that was put into effect in 1985. They made the Kenai a State Park and wanted to slow the boats down so this controversial rule cost all of us a ton of lettuce...I remember sitting in a meeting when the rule was proposed and telling my friend Rod Berg..."they can't do that". Wrong again, Jethro. In fact Ray there was fishing with me because he was put out of his own boat by the regulation, it was a Water Walker 2 built by Rick Cheverton in Anchorage and had a 454 Chevy engine in it.

The scene below actually signaled the end for big fast beautiful boats like Rays. Two jet boats came around the corner right here at the Big Eddy and were going so fast that the closing rate made it impossible to avoid a collision. This boat here ended up high and dry, 40 feet from the water. Nobody was killed but several folks had broken bones and the scare of their lives. All of us that were so effected by the horsepower limit had to admit that as bitter a pill as it  was to swallow it was a good thing...Now I just wish we'd have another fresh idea that could help the river as much as it did.

The pic below was my first legit 70 pound King to come to the boat. As luck would have it MP's sister Paula caught it. This fish was a bruiser, it jumped, it ran, we hooked it in the Big Eddy and landed at HoneyMoon Cove. Paula and her husband there, Eric, were on their honeymoon and that fish kind of took Paula out of the game. She threw her back out and had to see the doctor then had days of bed rest....that's when you know you've tussled with a salmon.

In the mid 80's I met Jacque Lizin who kind of helped change my life. Working for Sabena Airlines Jacko sent me lots and lots of customers and taught me and MP about good food and wine. As an Airline guy he can fish anywhere in the world, and you know where he likes it best? yup, right here at Mile 14. In this pic Jacque has a silver on, the rod is a one piece Fenwick that I had made by Dangerous Dan Ring, the rowboat man. That rod is fiberglass and let me tell you...you could land the Queen Mary with that baby.

Below is ole Griz....Loren Stewart. It was mid May and we were working around the boat launch and we see a salmon role....then another, and another. Well, it takes me about 15 minutes to hustle home and get the boat and Loren catches this fish on the first drift right here in front of the boat launch. Wow. He's got an old Berkely Bucaneer with a Spinning reel and yellow Stren line. While he had the fish on I was kind of shielding my face figuring the rod could explode at anytime. It didn't and we had fresh salmon for supper. It was this day that got me to fishing earlier and earlier every spring. I'd bet dollars to donuts the Minnow 3 caught the first King out of the Kenai for at least 10 of the 20 years it fished.

So in 1990 I get a call from my friend Ron Swanson who owns the Honda dealership. Honda has just come out with the 1st 'large' 4-stroke motor and he wants me to showcase the product. Yahtzee. I ended up running two different motors and went 10 years without buying an outboard. Going to the Honda was one of the best and biggest changes of my guide career, it was like when I quit smoking, big Ju Ju. It was quiet, it didn't smoke, it was frugal on gas, it trolled smoothly...I had the best stuff on the river, no doubt, and to be a spokesman for Honda was huge...I'd arrived, I'm a full blown, go to, professional guide.

Well,  thats a short trip through the first 25 years or so. What started out as me dodging work turned into a lifetimes pursuit....ahh....but I'm still dodging work...and pretty successfully I'd say. So please come back to the blog next week and I'll run through this last decade and the Minnow 4.

Busy Work

The other day I built this collage. I was trying to use up the ink in my printer ( so that I can use my new scanner and show you next week pictures from the Kenai 30 years ago)....(the scanner that Sam left) and this sunset compilation is something I'd been wanting to do, I might just lead the world in sunset pictures....and it kind of matches my mood, I've been in a bit of a funk lately. I guess I'm just having a hard time getting used to the idea that of the the 3 people I love the most 2 of them are not in Alaska with me anymore. Part of it I guess is the frustration of love, no matter how much you want, how well you know, whatever you'd do to make it happen, you can't make other people happy and have a good life, they have to do it themselves. All you can do is make yourself happy and hope that it is a foundation for all you love. It kind of blends in with the truth or relationships, as close as MP and I are, as much as I think I know her and can sense her....well, I ain't her and she ain't me and I really don't and never will really know for certain what she thinks and what she goes through, but I wish I could. Am I rambling?  I'll get over it , I just wish I could do more for Sam right now.

So doctor Jeff prescribes a regime of busyness to help me over these temporary blues. I've been doubling up on my gym time although today I was forced to stop lifting with some kind of deep muscle pull in my bi-cep, it'll heal, I always do. On Friday I'm installing new carpet in the master bedroom and replacing a window with a crack in that has bothered MP for the 15 years we've lived in this house. I cleaned out the wood stove in the sauna. And the other day I built this bottle tree which will be a nice addition to the eclectic mix of things we have here at Mile 14. As you can see we have a modest start on the bottles and I think its going to be ultra cool.....so yesterday when shopping for a bottle of wine to go with supper we were looking at bottle colors rather than varietals and cost.....mmmmm... this could get weird. I found my self looking in the recycle bin at the dump, theres gotta be some red bottles somewhere.

MP loves her birds, the nut hatchers and chicadees, the Jay birds and woodpeckers. So as she got out the feeder that Dick Hahn built for her 10 years ago I got to thinking that the birds might not notice but it looked a little rough. But the birds liked it so I built a spanking new one with the same dimensions as the old one. MP was impressed, she didn't even ask me to do it.  I guess maybe thats why my Mexican buddies call me mon da lon, man who wears apron.

So I'm staying busy. busy body = busy mind. I'm going to lay off the weight lifting until my arm feels better and I'll concentrate on cardio exercise and losing some body fat. I'll practice my music, watch the series, take a sauna, write the blog, order some surf fishing tackle,  cook supper, just keep busy, no worries....I might even do the dishes...So come back in a week, when I get this scanner figured out I'm going to post pics of fishing back in 'the good ole days'. I'll print pics of my first few boats and the fish they brought in. I'll bet I can even find some pics and history of this place right here.....mile 14, Kenai River Alaska.

Moving On...Ya don't know, until ya go

Even after 40 years in Alaska I'll never get used to the transient nature of the people here. You forge new friendships...and they leave for the 48, of all the people I started with in Alaska I can only name a few that are still here. Some came with a plan, make their North Slope money and then buy that ranch in the states or retire to Arizona. Some people just have to move on, they 've been in Alaska too long, they wonder what its like in the real world....that's the case I guess with that guy right there, my youngest son Samuel John.

Having grown up in the military I wanted my kids to have the kind of community continuity that I never had. To live in one place and to have known people there entire lives. I think that's part of this deal, part of this Alaska love-hate-gotta go-be right back syndrome. My oldest son Maxwell Steven is already in the 48, Sams leaving next week for the Seattle area, which to me is way better than the first plan that was to go to Los Angeles. While going to college he did several semesters at Northern Arizona in Flagstaff and that was just enough taste of it that he never forgot that he wanted more, like my first summer working the cannery in Kenai I guess. So after working different jobs and getting his degree from UAA he's out of here, wander lust at work and I understand entirely, after all, theres a big old interesting world out there and Sam needs to challenge it and himself. But Alaska is a special place, its hard to get started here and for some harder to leave. Let me tell you what I've learned about that whole deal.....

Personally I figure that I haven't really lived here as much as I've accomplished it. When I came to Soldotna I jokingly told people "ya better get used to me cause I ain't leavin". The sacrifice and hard work, not to mention the heart ache that it took to work through our youth and land here at Mile 14 is way too much to gamble away with the notion I could live somewhere else....but for Sam, its perfect, the right time in his life to find things out just as me and MP did when we moved here.

I think Alaskans, born and bred like Samuel John sometimes don't do so well in the 48, it is different you know. Looking around my old home State  of Montana I think of the hunting and fishing opportunities and I see all the fences  it feels like you'd be fishing in somebodies yard . I'm in town and I look around and instead of seeing nothing that man has made I see only what he has.  I look around the city and I wonder what are the chances of running into somebody I might know like happens so routinely here in Slowdotna. I guess I'm also a bit naive, I've never really seen poverty or even poorness of spirit, it bothers me and I see it in the city..... I'm always amused at how the city boundaries are delineated by only a sign, before it and after it looks the same but its new town, new school district, new politics, new social order, new issues....here in Alaska all that is so much easier to spot. In the city you go for walks, here its a hike.

So we're doing all we can to help make this transition as 'seamless' as possible as they say in the white collar world . We talked Sam into shipping his car rather than drive the Alcan as winter approaches but it occurred to me that deprived him of some of the adventure. That was his concession to me, so I wouldn't be so nervous about the trip. His old store manager has house in Tacoma where he'll hang his hat and find a job and follow his passion for micro brews. We have family and many good friends like Dick and Lorreta in the area so thats a comfort as well.....but jeez....we're going to miss that bi-yearly drive to Soldotna to get his oil changed by the old man. We're going to miss Turkey Day. We're going to miss....him. Oh, did I tell you he plays a pretty darn good lead guitar and well, that I'm going to miss....

So being a musician and a little consumer orientated Sam has some pretty cool stuff that I get temporary custody of like a Fender Strat and this Line 6 amp. Its Line FlexTone 3 which is as cool as it gets. A lot of musicians favor the old 'tube type' amps for sound quality and effects. Well this amp has a computer in it that mimics any and all of the 'classic' sounds, if you want it to sound like an old Fender Princeton from my Jr. High days or a Marshall Stack from my last rock concert you just turn it to it...walla. The dogs scared of it and I think MP hates it but me....I'm liking that real good...  In a godda divida baby....Well, I'll take good care of it Sam, happy trails and I'd bet you'll still get that alcan drive in, if not soon, someday. I've seen that part of the syndrome many times to.