Silver Dollars

I have to say that me and MP came across a gorgeous sockeye salmon on our walk yesterday morning but I'm a little tired of those salmon so he was right where he oughta be... high and dry in the middle of the parking lot.

Last week Keith invited me to guide 3 days for a large family group and it was just wonderful to be out anchored up in 70 degree weather chasing my favorite salmon, coho's. Unlike those sockeyes silver salmon are great, maybe the best sportfish.  They are aggressive biters, the jump and run hard when hooked and they can be tricked into biting with several different techniques, so that gives them 2 out of 3 over the more numerous but boring Kenai River Reds that everyone seems to be just obsessed over.  I don't get it, People would rather wade hip high in water for 3 hours and snag or hold onto the dumb end of a dip net for hours to catch a boring ol sockeye when they could be chasing silvers like this one, our first of the year that it took Brody about 10 minutes into the morning to catch.

Considering the intensity of the commercial set net fishery this year I was completely surprised on our first silver trip that there were any at all to catch. I actually wrote a blog entry yesterday about ADF+G and I just can't publish....it just makes me sick to think or write anymore about the lack of concern for other users or the fish themselves that the commercial promoters at ADF+G have adopted. In all my years I've never seen such aggressive commercial sockeye harvest at all cost done...The smaller runs of our endangered Kings and usually abundant silvers just get hammered while they fish day after day after day with nets for those reds....all the time believing in their vodoo science or what they call 'management' . Did I say I wasn't going to publish the anti ADF+G rant ?....trust me, that was the short version.

Here's a pic of Ben  and the boys from Minnesota on the dock at days end.

The girls had to work a little harder the next few days but we held our own against it and you know me, we always do as good as we can and work at it as hard as we can, it's all you can do it this ol life of a Kenai guide. Here's a couple of pics of Bree and Kimmy. I really like the pic of Kim with the sun on her face, you can just feel the river environment in her smile and in the air.

As we sat under the Eagle tree waiting for our next bite we watched this gull wrestle with a live Dolly about 16 inches long. This guy really told a side note of the Kenai River story...the darn fish was just a little to big and a little to alive for him to handle but when his buddies arrived he got worried and slid it down whole which looked to be real uncomfortable and of course he was then to heavy to fly and well....you can imagine what happened then. He's not much different than the July dip netter that takes so many reds that his boat won't get up on step so he runs out of gas on the way home....or the set netter that wants to fish like he did in 1971 although it's now 2015 and he want's that so bad he won't change even a little bit until the people put together a signature drive for a ballot measure that will stop it all and hopefully be on the ballot this October. It's to bad , because I really think we ought to be a bit smarter and fairer than that Seagull . To bad we're not .