fishin

Well I had an excellent blog posted this morning and about 30 people got to read it when I decided to edit another picture onto it and some how or another hit the wrong button with these musicians fingers of mine and holy %*&@ it's gone. Disappeared, Deleted. So being the guy who over does most things I guess I'll just make up another story kinda like the last one....

That's a pic of me and Tom Welle who is one of surf fishing buddies from Mazatlan. He was touring the state with his brother and sister and their spouses in a nice motorhome so they stayed the night at Mile 14 and we went trout fishing...and I had an absolute ball. I guess I must be losing a step or so when it comes to my salesmanship because this last month when I would explain to people that the river is closed to Kings until July first but we have this wonderful trout resource I don't get any takers. And the rest of the guides must also suffer from the same salmon mania because we were literally the only boat fishing in a 10 mile stretch of beautiful river, it was magic. We must have caught 25 rainbows and several Dollies, many the size of this one with Tom and we lost one grande....you know we catch them up to 10 or 12 pounds.

Tom is quite the fish bum, he'll fish for anything, anywhere for any amount of time. So I decided to invite my friend Troy Moorhead for two reasons, he's fun to be around and with the water a little chalky I needed his  counsel, like Tom he's a guy who could catch fish in the Mojave Desert.

Troy and I went into executive session and decided to start with half egg patterns and half flesh. With so many fish around it seemed like it all worked but the flesh had an edge. Late in the day I decided it was time to personally tie on my first attempt at tying an articulated flesh fly. I start with double snell and cut one barb and then get some champagne color yarn on the front and some dirty white feathers and mylar on the rear and walla....I have what Troy described as the butt ugliest fly he'd ever seen. And it was ultra rewarding to see it work so well. And Troy, I'll get that articulated flesh fly pattern a little more refined in the future.

Below is a pic of Tom's brother Bob with a prime piece of Kenai River real estate he caught, kinda strange but it's all part of the days chuckle. Now poor old Dan sitting there had quite the case of snake bite going on. I'd change colors for him...no fish. I'd change leader length.....no fish. At one point I asked him if he ever spent much time at the Casino's they have back at his home in Minnesota and he said " no, never go to Casino's " ...  I said " well that's a good thing".

Here's a pic of Bob with a little dolly, do those guys look like they're having fun or what ? With the water clearing now I think we can catch gads of rainbows and I just don't understand why people don't want to do more of it. I mean c'mon, these guys are just like King salmon but smaller...alright, a lot smaller....but they make up for that by more numerous eh ?

Speaking of numerous....It takes a good man to admit when he's wrong so here goes. I was overly optimistic when I forecast  8500 early run King salmon. But hey, I'm as good at the forecast game as ADF+G. But forget about the numbers, here's a pic of the graph showing this years run compared to the last two...and mind you there are 8 days of counts left. Pretty darn impressive I'd say.

Impressive....that's what the managers at ADF+G must have been thinking when they changed the limit for saltwater Kings from 2 to 5....and opened the ' King Salmon Conservation Zone' to fishing ....AND gave the commercial set net fishery an early emergency opening. Impressive for sure. So as part of the group that got nothing out of this deal and I mean nothing....not even rubber hooks on tuesday from 2:00 to 2:10 pm only on the port side of the boat... I got just a simple question for you guys in charge of all things fishy. Just what the hell did we Kenai people do to deserve this so we don't ever do it again ????

Here's the pic that I tried to post when Blogspot ate my last entry. I really wanted to end this blog with something positive so look at this  gorgeous Muligan Bull that visited us at Mile 14. Our moose herd seems to be doing better so I guess an ADF+G manager somewhere must be doing something right. But then again it could be dumb luck.