Second Day’s Huge Salmon Catch

We started the day at 8 am by loading up in our float-plane with our pilot, two fishing guides, Brian and myself. We flew over some stunning rivers, lakes and valleys, through some canyons and between some mountains to arrive finally at the day’s first fishing spot.

We could see from the plane that two adolescent bears were fishing the spot, which confirmed that salmon were running. As we walked from our plane to the river mouth where the fresh water dumps into the bay we were reassured that we would have no problems from the bears, we were armed with two shotguns.

As we approached the mouth of the river, the one of the bears begrudgingly left us to fish. The other stayed on the opposite side of the river mouth and continued to fish. He was about as successful as we were. We had a lesson in fly-fishing and began. We could see the fish running through the shallow water as they came up the bay getting ready to run up the river. There were salmon all around and we were attempting to catch them on light fly reels and gear. We learned to fly fish through the day but only landed two of the salmon.

We then flew up into the mountains further in search of a perfect fishing stream for trout. We eventually located what looked like a perfect spot. After fishing downstream from a beautiful lake in a most promising stream and not seeing, much less catching a single trout, we moved on.

We located a lake that had salmon you could see from the plane waiting to swim up a small stream to spawn. We could see hundreds of salmon, if not more.

We spent hours hooking, fighting and sometimes catching the salmon on fly rods/reels and a few on spinners. At one stretch, I had hooked 10 fish, landing five on 14 casts. We hooked and caught fish until our arms were tired.

Exhausted from the day, we flew back to our lodge and are now waiting on a dinner of our various catches. Apparently, we already have enough fish and crab for Brian and I to each take home 50 pounds.

See yesterday’s blog post for Day One of John and Brian’s Big Adventure.