Monday July 26

A Day Fit for a King

What do you know…still raining.

Headed back to Hope for more fishing. Like I said yesterday, the river in Hope empties into the sea. The actual spot where it empties has these incredible tides. The tide rises and falls one foot every 20 minutes and it is crazy. The total length of the tide line is around 27 feet. Standing in the same spot one part of the day you can’t see the end of the river, 6 hours later your knee deep in the ocean. It’s best to fish the rising tide so I killed time waiting for it I watched another Meryl Streep film called “Doubt”. It was a good one. Around 5pm the tide turned, I threw my waders on and went at it. I caught a ton more pinks or “humpies” as the locals say.

So at one point I’m standing in the river up to my knees, I look to one side and I can’t believe what I see. It looked like a giant red log. It was a king salmon, the largest type of all the salmon. I was probably way out matched with the size rod I was using, but, like my friend Mark used to do, I made the cast and figured I'd worry about problems as they came up. I hooked it immediately. It felt heavy. Like a giant log it swam slowly to the other side of the river and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I battled it a while across the width of the river and finally it started to come to me. I managed to get it close enough to shore that a guy down stream grabbed it by the tail and yanked it onto the gravel. The thing was insane. The salmon was old, spawned out and was probably going to die one of these days just like salmon do. If it were fresh from the sea, pre spawn, I probably never would have landed it. Anyway you look at it, I had just caught the king. My first ever. It looked insane, black and red all over, nasty looking, with huge teeth. I could not believe my luck. I had just caught a king salmon on a 9wt fly rod.

The rest of the day people kept coming up to me asking if I was the guy that caught the king salmon. One woman shrieked when she saw it come ashore…..she later asked me, “What was that thing?” It was a monster and knowing it was alive and that it was still alive in this little stream was pretty surprising to most people.

It was time to regroup back in Anchorage. Drove the 2 hours and stopped at the only restaurant still open, Popeye’s, for some chicken.

Hope was wonderful. Misty mountains and mysterious fish……