Friday July 30

The Mission is Fishin'

On a great tip from a patron of Mossy's fly shop named Greg, I decided to fish the mouth of Jim Creek where it meets the Knik River. This area is famous as being the home of Robert Hansen, the serial killer who murdered at least 17 prostitutes in the early eighties. Wonder if Bob was a fly fisherman......Not only was the area home to complete nut cases but Greg told me that it would be a great place to catch a silver (coho) salmon. He called it the mullet spot (as in the hair cut)......business in the front (fishing), and party in the back. If you looked strait forward you saw, between two snow capped mountains, the Knik Glacier where the Knik River started as it flowed to a point right in front of you. It was a beautiful setting. The party part comes in when you turn around. It was beer drinking, 4 wheelin', dirt bikin', mud boggin', madness! The trail alone down to the river was a maze of muddy tracks hammered into oblivion by every type of of 4 wheel drive vehicle known to man. It was like a scene out of Mad Max's Beyond Thunderdome minus Mel Gibson and Tina Turner, where everyone drives around in these wacky vehicles in search of gasoline. No kidding, I even saw two full on Peterbuilt tractor trailer rigs down there on the beach. How they got there I have no idea...the roads were gnarly. Check the trails in the photos.

But the fishing was spectacular! I must have caught over 20 salmon....some over 10 pounds. After all was said and done, I'd caught 6 beautiful silver salmon. Mission accomplished. Special thanks to Greg from Mossy's for the perfect spot.

Just to add to the mayhem some guy gave me a ride back to the parking lot (at least a mile over hellacious terrain) in the bed of his pick-up truck. At times the mud was above the the rims. The guy was a saviour. I gave him and his dad each a handful of mini snickers and NAPA baseball hat's I'd been carrying around.

A little pizza party celebration of success back at the Mooses Tooth (corny) where I talked to this guy who pitched for the Mets and the Indians before wrecking his shoulder. He told me that the players used to hang candy bars near the end of this mysterious pipe in the visitors dug out at Fenway........and the rats used to come out and snatch them.