- Henry David Thoreau, “Walden Pond”
On the floatplane - and for the previous two months - I’d envisioned slinging hot-pink streamers at deep slots and pocket water, mending line with brio and letting my fly hang for a moment at drift’s end before - WHAM! - a 40-inch flash of steel intercepted my leader, breaking the water’s surface and zipping into the air like the prima ballerina.
Anglers who have caught steelhead on a fly rod describe it as the single most gratifying fish to play - a hard-fighting, plucky, spirited and (important to remember) elusive animal.
Because I’d imagined perfect success on every cast, I was confident my trip to Alaska would be the pinnacle of my life. Insurmountable. The crown jewel of fishing trips. Oh, the stories I would tell.
Arriving after a tiring day of travel, longtime fishing buddies Blake and Tom, who in our formative years taught me how to catch pike using pop bottles on Minnesota lakes, met me at the Ketchikan airport. As we ferried across the “Bridge to Nowhere,” I plied them with questions about stream conditions and weather forecasts, only half-listening to their replies as I wondered who would take a photo if we all caught fish at once.
During some phase of the planning for this mid-November sojourn, I had understood that it was late in the year for a steelhead run, even for a late run, which was precisely the kind we had hoped for. I’d been warned, again and again, about the supreme difficulty in catching steelhead, which is essentially a sea-run rainbow trout.
These nearly forgotten caveats finally began to make an impression on me as our charter plane out of Ketchikan was delayed for a day due to heavy winds, and some part of my subconscious made a rapid descent to reality, where I was left to ponder my chances of success. What if we didn’t catch any fish?
I grew up fly-fishing for spooky browns and brookies in southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, and when my passion migrated along with me to western Montana, the trout streams seemed to hold boundless promise, which more often than not, did not go unrealized.
Still, I was familiar with disappointment, and on numerous occasions painted white stripes down my back, skunked again.
But disappointment was tolerable when it came came after a 40-minute drive down the Bitterroot Valley and a fruitless afternoon on a local stream. This was different. I had planned extensively for this trip. Borrowed gear. Spent well beyond my budget.
Flying over the Tongass National Forest, I took in the view and forgot about those misgivings. Touching down in front of the U.S. Forest Service fishing cabin, scanning our lush mountainous surroundings, it occurred to me that even if we caught no fish, the beauty of this country was too great. There was no room for disappointment, no time for my expectations or ill-conceived foretastes. It was time to fish.
It made sense, then, that an hour later, and on his first cast, Blake hooked into something big. He was standing on a gravel bar in about 2 feet of water, adjacent to a deeper slot of holding water. I watched as the tip of his 7-weight rod twitched violently before permanently horseshoeing, a shape it would retain for the next 15 minutes as Blake played and fought the creature, the hypnotic whir of his reel like audible Hope to my ears.
A fin. A reddish flash. Lots of splashing. What kind of fish was this?
And then the line went slack, the beast having rolled off the streamer before we could determine its species.
No matter, though, because several casts later and Blake was into another monster. Another 15 minutes and he had landed a beautiful, 12-pound - salmon. A silver. A not-so silver silver, really, as these Coho salmon were pretty well spawned out, although they still had plenty of fight left.
During their lives in the ocean, Coho have silver sides and dark-blue backs. Their jaws and teeth become hooked during their spawning phase, however, and they develop bright red sides and bluish-green heads.
Silvers fall somewhere below king salmon on the piscatorial caste system, a kind of social stratum that anglers apply to game fish. For fly-fishing purists, they’re not in the same realm as steelhead.
But none of this mattered much, I discovered as we caught fish after beautiful fish, despite never catching, or even so much as glimpsing, a steelhead.
In many ways, this was the trip of a lifetime, just as those early mornings spent fly-fishing with my dad on the banks of the Rush River remain my most vivid fishing memories.
We spent the next three days fishing, and that was good enough for me. Standing in glacial streams, our neoprened legs numbing and thawing, we shared whiskey shots to warm our trunks before casting again, quartering line upstream, mending and following the fly back down.
It was a good rhythm, which improved in the evenings, when we cooked T-bone steaks and played hearts in the warmth of the cabin, or dealt five-card stud for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and matchsticks.
We were rich.
Reporter Tristan Scott can be reached at 523-5264 or at tscott@missoulian.com.
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