Just Us

In my thousands of hours on the Kenai River I should know to never be surprised by its beauty. I've told people for years that its a living thing, always changing, new every day. So last night at sundown, 4:30 for us but two hours  later for the rest of the world we went down to the launch for a sauna. It was the perfect mix of elements, snow falling, light fading and the tide was up making for a lake like stillness, wow.

Even though Mile 14 is on the edge of town, its eerie quiet...all the folks from the summer homes across the river are gone. Kenai Riverbend across and down from us is winterized, the fish are over so the Eagles are slowly but surely looking elsewhere, I suppose the seals to have moved on south a bit looking....its just us.

Snow Story

When it snows, we know....Just how much wildlife there is here at Mile 14. Its one of me and MP's favorite things, to go out after the fresh snow and sleuth out all the fresh tracks of who's around. MP has this wonderful way of thinking it the same animals all the time and that they live with us rather than migrate through.

The coyote has to be the hardiest critter on the Kenai, well other that Dan France that is. They will scratch through 2 Feet of ice to get to a fish skeleton, but this guy was after something alive, well, it used to be.

He calmy walked across the parking lot to the downriver tree line. He stood right there and pounced to the grass, a span of about 4 feet....man I'll bet thats a sight.

 He landed and thats where he got him, just a drop or two of blood tells the story.

 He drug it up the parking lot and I suppose it died here, no hair, no feathers...mmmmm.....maybe a vole, maybe a rabbit or spruce hen....we'll never know, its just a snow story.

Fit 2012

Ten years ago when I was 49 I went into the gym on my fitness quest, I've done great. I've lost a lot of weight and built muscle, every year I'd set goals, sometimes achieving them and sometimes not...but, I was always hurting myself. Last year one of my goals was to bench press my own weight which I did, and promptly screwed up my shoulder so bad that I thought I wouldn't be able to surf fish. So this year I decided to start acting like an adult and just strive for overall fitness and it couldn't be going any better. One of my goals is absolute....I HAVE to lower my cholesterol. My other goal is to get leaner, that jelly role around my mid section is driving me crazy and this summer I had settled in a little over 200 pounds. Since I started 10 years ago 200 pounds was my Alamo, I said I would NEVER weigh over that amount again. Here's a pic taken of me today and what I've been doing different this year.

So how many 59 year old body builders have you ever seen? Not too many right ? Well, you're looking at one less. Its no wonder my cholesterol was off the chart. For years during my training season I was eating 15 or 20 eggs a week, red meat and protein shakes. Done with that, since my blood panel last April I've only eaten a few eggs and steaks and no shellfish. I've tripled up my fish oil and am using quality fish oil thanks to the recommendation of my friend Greg Davis. I'm eating lots, and I mean lots of oats. Vegetables, a load of those babies. I started on the diet September 18th and weighed 203 pounds, this morning I was at 192.

I'm still lifting weights. I used to think that if you add weight you add muscle, now my strategy is to maintain the muscle I have with less weight, more repetitions. Instead of lifting every day I'm lifting every other day. For the first time in many a year ALL my joints feel great, I'm almost entirely pain free. I actually had myself convinced that success in the gym meant tolerating pain....yikes.

Every morning I do 40 minutes of hard cardio. Every week day in the afternoon I walk 2 1/2 miles.

My new snack food is celery and hummus. Instead of trying to get 200 grams of protein a day I'm eating enough chicken , fish and turkey to supply half of that.

I haven't eaten a  single DQ blizzard, Lays tater chip, black licorice or any of the things I'm weak for since September...Its kind of funny, I have great discipline when I set my sights on something, my only problem in life has been that I haven't spotted to many of those 'somethings'.

I used to think carbohydrates were the enemy. I've learned that you gotta have them, they're the fuel for your energy. But, complex carbs only..." if its white, it ain't right".

For the last 5 or 6 years I've tried to go to Mazatlan under 190 pounds, it hasn't happened but it will now. I was just eating to much and getting to big, the leaner me will walk farther, fish harder and live better. The way its going I might even qualify for another Speedo picture eh?..(sept. 2010)

That's our friend Zack Loyd doing pull ups, pretty cool deal. With October being Breast Cancer awareness month some of the folks at the gym decided to stage an event for a mens health issue, prostate cancer. So Zack stepped forward and took pledges, how many legal pull ups can he do in 4 hours ?...I guessed 500....wrong. Zack did 1025 pull ups in 4 hours and raised well over 3000 dollars for Prostate cancer. I'm proud to say this is the kind of people we're hanging out with....I'm just glad I had a gamblers instinct and donated a set amount, the folks that donated per pull up, well, ....ouch.

Hurricane Sandy

As I type this at 9:30 am Alaska Time my son Max and his girlfriend Skye are making a hasty retreat from the Hurricane . Over the weekend they attended a wedding in Conneticut and were scheduled to fly out of JFK this evening, well that's not happening so they were faced with two choices, sit tight in their motel or hit the road, which is what they're doing now. They've turned their rental car in at Danbury and have other friends from Minnesota that have a rented S.U.V. , the 4 of them are on the road headed west, if all goes right the 1200 miles should take them a full day and some. I hope that by this evening when Sandy hits the city they are well away maybe even close to Ohio...I'll up date this when we here from them but for now we've encouraged them to save their cell batteries so no news is good news I guess.

I'm not feeling good, I guess maybe its a healthy sign that you can love somebody so much that you can make yourself physically sick with worry. I wish I was as strong as MP that way, her head stays way more level than mine and she has this way of pointing out the practical. So lets all think positive thoughts for those young people....and all of the people in harms way today.

I'll update this....

At 2:00 pm Alaska Time MP talked with Max, they were driving through Williamsport PA. and it looks to me like they should be out of Pennsylvania by nightfall or there abouts. They are in a Large S.U.V. Max related that this morning as they left the seaboard the rain was torrential and it was hard to navigate but now the rain although bad is falling less.....they stopped for what he described as 'the best Philly Cheesecake sandwich anywhere"....thata boy Max.

7:30 am Alaska , Tuesday.....Max just left a phone message as we were at the health club. They drove all night and are back in Minneapolis with an adventure to relate. He said its amazing how fast 1200 miles can go by.

I'm tickled and releived. They made the right descision, if they had stayed on the East Coast who knows how long they would be waiting for a flight. And their timing was just right, if they had left any later it would have been more difficult than it was.

Today

MP and I both agreed, the best part of having this wonderful property at Mile 14 of the Kenai River was today. And through the years we've had a lot of 'todays'.  After sleeping through another snoozer football game we decided that after the high water we finally had enough shoreline for one of our exploration trips and then a sauna. All of you that know this place know how the road down kind of reveals the river a bit at a time....we see some white, bigger than gulls....

The whole Trumpeter family. They weren't scared of us and never flew, they just swam on down to the next feed bed, no worries. At the tip of the island we used to have 10 'eagle trees' , big cottonwoods that the beavers were systematically knocking over and of course the Eagles love. This is the last survivor, the one that me and MP wrapped chicken wire around the base of about 10 years ago.

And again the birds were never scared of us, I guess they know....and I guess they notice us as much as we notice them . This one here was sitting in the tree at the launch that we call ' Rays Spot' ....its still yours Ray Gavalak.

Then we found our first really cool find of the new scavenge season, a red jet unit from unit the 70's. I ran these things myself as a young guy and let me tell you, anybody that's run them knows they're temperamental buggers.  The jet unit would vibrate so much that they would eventually shear the bolts and walla....adrift on the wild Kenai. And I'll bet back in the era when this poor guy lost it the adventure was just starting, he rowed to shore, walked to the launch, got help from Loren Stewart and then shared Scotch with him, that's the way I figure it happened.

The rivers still way higher than normal for this time of year but with patience and knowing the route we picked our way downriver just fine.

I fired up the sauna as Mp rode the wheeler up to the house to get water, by then Jacques special French bubbly was good and cooled.  It took a bit to get to our optimum heat of 180 and walla, the perfect way to end the day. MP washes my hair for me and we both agree.....today's the best day.

Job Hunt

With the season we had MP has been kind of encouraging me to do something that I've pretty much successfully dodged for the last 20 years or so.....

Stuff

When I was a young guide I kind of thought  that all the 'stuff' that goes with guiding was pretty darn cool. I'd have all my rods out and gear displayed so people would say "wow, that's a lot of stuff". But 30 some years later I've come to view it all as just tools, like a carpenters hammer, the only difference is that I've never seen a hammer that didn't work.

So that peg board is something you see when you enter my garage / office/ headquarters and studio. That wall is a testament to America and fishing. Guys like me will buy anything that looks fishy or even seems fishy....and we'll usually buy more than one. A good chunk of them end up here on the losers wall, after all the stuff that works ends up in your tackle box, right? So lets take a look at a few of these products that were sure to make fishing magic for the Pro's from Dover....

Luhr Jensen makes some of the most successful salmon lures in the world...and the Flutter Jig ain't one of them. The development of this lure is a salmon fishing legend. In the early 80's an Oregon fishing guide was spotting  these King salmon on his fish finder that were holding on the bottom in 30' at the mouth of the White River where it meets the Columbia.  The water being deep and slow there was no way to get at the fish with the usual salmon egg type lures so he put on a saltwater jig and dropped straight down to them....walla....the first one was snagged right in the mouth and the vertical jig fishery had begun. Well it didn't take long before folks  started to notice that these fish were biting an awful lot with other parts of their body besides their mouths which kind of complicated the fishery and other techniques came back to use. The Flutter Jigs that I have were purchased at John' Sporting Goods in Everett Washington in the 80's. This place is a fisherman's dream and has a real cult following so whenever we're close we get to John's for a look see. The day I bought these he had shelves of them at 7 bucks apiece. I went to check out with two of them and John says "I'll give em to ya for a buck apiece if you buy 20 " ......mmmm.....that should have told me they'd end up on the wall.

The stingfish lure is a spin off on Luhr Jensens venerable Kwikfish lure. It has an 'e-chip' built into the bill that emits an electrical charge. The package says " as the Stingfish lure is trolled the e-chip emitter on the front of the lure gives off tiny electrical pulses duplicating the nerve discharge of a wounded baitfish". Well....I don't know about everybody else but I've towed the paint off these things and all it ever caught was water. What they seem to work best for is when I have people fishing to close behind me I chuck em into the water and invariably the guys cheap gene clicks in and he moves the boat to go get it. Perfect. I got my collection from a friend who was a tackle rep and asked me to help him sell pro cure at the Great Alaska Sportmans Show. I stood on my feet for two days selling egg cure and got paid with cases of Stingfish lures and oh....I guess I got some "monster bite' scent to,  but that's another story. I'm hoping that someday my friend Craig will call and want to go fishing, got any idea what would be a good lure for him to fish with????

Now that Nitro Diver there is impressive. The Stingfishes technological advantage had to do with sound and pulses, well this baby has a 'scent delivery system' it has Phermone technology with its included ' Nitro Gravy' with 'Factor X2'...that's gotta work right?  Once again it seems to be a take off on a Luhr Jensen Product, the Jet Diver that every salmon fisherman owns many of. The Jet Diver puts the Kwikfish lure down where the salmon live and helps it 'track' properly through the current. So what could be better than add 'gravy' to this already successful formula ? So I guess maybe I never had it rigged right  and I just gave up on them....if you really want to put the 'sport' in sportfishing I recommend you tow one of these around for an entire day with a Stingfish behind it.....and bring a book.

I saved my favorite for last, the Tasmanian Devil, made in Australia. We all know Australia was founded by prisoners and criminals so its no wonder these babies ended up on the market. The package says "They bite like the Devil"....and that's pretty darn catchy. Throw in the graphic cover of the screeching bat like varmint himself and you have a lure that any red blooded fisherman can't resist...but the fish sure can.

I'll let ya know when we're having the garage sale. I'll sell this stuff cheap, almost free as they say in Mexico. Like I say, I've got lots of stuff.