2017....

It's in the books....I feel bad for making all of you wait a bit longer for a Mile 14 update but I was really hoping to get a call or two and do some more fishing. Although wet and miserable, in fact wet enough to make the Snow Glacier dump and give us light flooding conditions once again the fishing was and is just excellent. Even now with the river clearing and finally falling again the fishing is better than I've ever seen it at the end of September....remember a big run starts sooner and ends later.

So I guess my old friend Bonnie and her daughter Julie were my last vict...ahhh.....fisher people for the year. And what a day it was. It rained the day before and the day after. This morning the river awoke to sunny skies and temps in the 50's, for us that's a GREAT day lately. Here's the three of us with the catch...

It means soooo much to me to have friends like Bonnie. She's a Kenaitze Native elder and lately has had a few health problems that she works through with the most wonderful optimism . When I first started guiding she had a rental car business at the airport and would recommend me to her customers. And salmon....oh boy does that woman know and love her salmon so I was pretty darn happy to help her get these beauties. Here's a close up of my friend Bonnie Koerber.

Right now we have a few nice days forecast so I'm going to wait to winterize the boat....just maybe...But still there's work to do here at Mile 14. The other day I was looking around for a power source for a security system I'm installing and I remembered that Loren had one in the closet by the front door so after being here for 21 years I finally looked at it. YIKES...this thing is OLD...but sure enough there's an electric outlet hanging from some wires ( like speaker wire ) that went through the wall to a hard wired light switch. I get to feeling it and holy @$#%& the outlet that's hanging is hot to the touch. Now I'm no electrician but it looked to me like we could have had a house fire at any time. So I hit the breaker and go to work with my end snips and problem solved....have you ever seen anything like this ?

This wonderful house at Mile 14 of the Kenai River was built in 1960 making it one of the oldest ' real ' houses in town and I 'd guess this contraption dates that far as well , 57 years. It's an Automatic Police alarm made by the Ademco Co. in Syosset New York.  My old friend Loren Stewart was a ' gadget ' type of guy so I shouldn't have been surprised at this but the installation I was. Here's pic of the inside of this machine that in the day I'd guess was state of the art equipment AND it ended up Soldotna Alaska at which time had only a handful of people in it. As you can see....more speaker wire. Did I ever tell you about starting a fire in my Volkswagon Super Beetle because of speaker wire ?

So you guys that follow this blog probably won't see any fresh fish pics until I hit the beach in about 5 weeks. MP's off to Moooootana on Monday so I'll put boats away and play the music ultra loud like I do when she's gone. Then we hit the gym as always and I power diet to lose my summer 10 pounds and walla.....life is good. I hope you keep reading Mile 14, I'll stay on schedule, kinda. and make it fun, I promise. But for now my fishing season is 10-86 as the cops say. It was a fantastic season, the best in 6 years so thank you to everybody who came. Thanks to the fish. Thanks to the ADF+G...and I mean that....really I do.... We'll do it all again one last time in 2018.