Unguided anglers lured by adventure of eight-day, fly-in, Alaska float trip
Bush pilots equipped to land on lakes, rivers or tundra operate out of virtually every airport to usher anglers into remote wilderness destinations where clouds of fish obscure river bottoms.
While Washington offers great salmon fishing, it lacks the Alaska experience.
Crowds of boats are indictors the salmon are running in the Columbia.
In Alaska, the game’s on when shores are littered with brown bear tracks and partially consumed fish carcasses. Rainbow trout and Dolly Varden flash as they feed on eggs like a sunny-day crowd with signaling mirrors.
Many Alaska fisheries are far beyond roads, but within easy reach of anglers who’ve stashed away a few grand for the trip of a lifetime.
I just returned from an eight-day, four-person, unguided float trip in southwestern Alaska that cost less than $2,500 apiece, round-trip from Spokane, including raft rentals, pre-trip lodging, bush flights and commercial airline travel.
Cost for a similar package using an outfitter and guides on a float trip or from a remote base camp would cost more than twice as much, plus tips.
Alaska guides will put an angler onto more fish than he’d find on his own – probably MANY more fish.
But the self-guided angler will still catch plenty of salmon, Dolly Varden and perhaps rainbows and grayling in Alaska with the bonus satisfaction of finding the magic on his own.
Over a meal of bright, freshly caught coho cooked at a gravel bar camp on Day 7, our group fondly reviewed our experience. Highlights, we agreed, involved learning where to fish and scouting for a campsite each day – usually well into the evening in the tundra where the sun was setting at 10 p.m.
Naming the river we floated isn’t necessary, a point confirmed at the end of our journey as we mixed with other anglers on the last leg of their trips at the Anchorage airport. We thought our trip couldn’t be matched, but we learned that virtually all of the anglers had found their piece of heaven in Alaska as long as they gave it a good shot of planning and had luck with the crapshoot of weather.
Everybody had an angle. Two men from Idaho bought an outboard, rented an inflatable boat and set up a base camp upstream from a village on one river. They made a contact for freezer space in the village and whacked and stacked coho for a week so they could bring home a small fortune of fish.
We chose to go light, traveling 7-8 miles a day with little ice and no capacity for storing fish. We returned our catches to the river, save for the fresh salmon we occasionally kept for camp dinner.
That’s not a bad plan when traveling in brown bear country.
Southwestern Alaska has a wealth of great salmon, trout and char float-fishing streams with flight services out of Dillingham, Bethel and King Salmon.
Traveling anglers must team with bush pilots who offer rentals for rafts, camp stoves and bear spray, since those items are costly or impossible to transport on commercial airlines.
Outfitters offering complete bush flight and gear services include Tikchik Airventures based in Dillingham on Bristol Bay and Renfro’s Alaskan Adventures out of Bethel on the Kuskokwim River.
An angler has numerous river options in southwestern Alaska, with some being smaller and more remote and many requiring 4-10 days to float.
Some of the fishing rivers are truly wild while others, such as the Kanektok, Goodnews and Mulchatna are dotted with villages and outfitter camps that use jet boats to run up and downstream.
The river options double when anglers choose to float backpacker style in single-person packrafts that allow navigating even more remote stretches of streams.
Rivers we researched include the Aniak, Arolik, Eek, Kanektok, Kisaralik and Goodnews including the South and Middle forks, plus the lesser known Holitna, Izavieknik and Kwethluk.
The Nushagak River and Mulchatna are especially tempting for earlier trips tapping king salmon runs.
But armed with fly rods, we narrowed our search to rivers prime in August for acrobatic silver salmon and the trout, char and grayling that feed on their arrival.
Self-guided anglers must arrive at small towns or villages well-prepared. Critical things like maps are not available and equipment and food that might be found in jump-off towns is expensive.
Outfitters usually have helpers to assist and make sure gear is within the float plane weight limits – usually around 70 pounds per person plus food. But few of these helpers have been on the rivers. They often don’t have good answers to specific questions, such as, “Where exactly are we getting picked up on Day 8?”
One universal truth prevails: The Alaska bush is no place for an angler with a rigid schedule. If foul weather closes in, as it did on us, bush pilots can’t fly, no matter how rich you are.
Bring extra food and a bucket load of patience.
Don’t forget the pee bottle for nights when you won’t want to get out of the tent.
Pack high-quality rain gear.
Mist, drizzle or rain was our frequent companion in the first six days of our trip. We joked that a 20-minute lull in precipitation was an Alaska drought.
But fishermen are well-suited for wet weather. Gore-Tex waders and jackets, which we wore most days from daybreak until we crawled into our tents, made us impervious to the squalls that moved in and out so frequently it was futile to remove a jacket.
Perhaps the only downside of total weatherproofing was a minor medical condition in our feet – let’s call it “neoprune.” It was especially prevalent among those of us with waders that sprung minor leaks from 14 hours a day of camping and fishing activity, crawling in and out of rafts and dragging them over shallow riffles.
Twice-a-day application of therapeutic hand lotion, such as CeraVe, pays off on long float trips by preventing painful cracked skin on fingers that are constantly wet, stripping line, reeling, releasing fish, rowing and stuffing tents and sleeping bags.
Alaska’s famous biting bugs were a minor annoyance. Clothed from head to toe, we never had to do more than pull on a hood and add a dab of DEET or drape a head net over a cap occasionally in camp.
Virtually every night we set up a rain tarp using a tripod of oars for support regardless of whether the skies looked threatening. Some degree of drizzle wet our camps every day but the last.
We took turns making camp dinners such as chicken curry, elk German sausages and potato salad and quesadillas, but our favorite dinners centered on fresh silver salmon caught within an hour or two of making camp.
Taking turns with chores at camp, some of us continued fishing after setting up the tents and kitchen while others prepared hors d’oeuvres with cheese, fruit and veggies. Wine or a shot of Grand Marnier or Scotch paved the way for every meal.
Wilderness survival can be civilized.
We fished and camped to the music of loons, white-fronted geese and sandhill cranes and the splashing of spawning sockeyes in side channels.
Wildlife encounters included five brown bears, a pair of fledgling great gray owls and a curious red fox, plus close calls with moose and wolves that left their tracks in the mud.
We encountered our first of five brown bears within three hours of being dropped off and that somewhat sobering moment of watching the float plane fly away.
The bear’s head raised 40 yards away in the short willows along the river as we floated by. It was chewing on a salmon.
We all promised to wander nowhere on the trip without bear spray.
The first fish we targeted were rainbow trout – leaping, tail-walking, leopard-spotted beauties that would be worth a trip in their own right. The few we caught took egg-sucking leeches, flesh flies and single egg-imitating beads.
Dolly Varden also were gorging on eggs behind the spawning sockeyes. But the dollies – and sometimes grayling – would take just about anything from egg patterns tumbling on the bottom to flies skated across the surface.
Occasionally an 8- to 10-pound green-headed, crimson-bodied sockeye would take our offerings, scream off some line and amaze us with how much zip it still had in that stage of spawning.
A few rising fish prompted a dry-fly fest as we rigged five-weight rods and skittered patterns like caddis and Royal Wulffs for Dollies and grayling.
That light-rod interlude ended when David Moershel hooked a silver salmon that ran downstream and threatened to spool his reel before he broke it off.
We armed ourselves with 7- and 8-weight rods for the rest of the float as we focused on coho running in from the Bering Sea.
After each of us had hooked an 8- to 12-pound coho that leaped, flipped and cart-wheeled up to six times, we were riveted on silver.
We eased through the discovery phase, sorting out which water to fish from the stretches that were better suited for making miles.
The learning phase lasted the entire trip, but some lessons were shorter than others.
Scott Wolff and Scott Redman, who had never caught a salmon and were new to fly fishing, were soon hooking silvers regularly.
The first couple of silvers Wolff caught took him to the cleaners in battles that went on as though he’d foul-hooked a Chevy.
“That fish is going to spawn and die before you get it in,” I said during one hookup.
After being heckled and accused of trying to subdue his salmon by drowning, Wolff learned when to back up and gently slide the coho onto a smooth-rock gravel bar where it could easily be unhooked and released.
We found no single salmon fly or color that greatly outperformed another. Green seemed hot one day, but a red and white Clouser Minnow couldn’t be topped the next day. Pink didn’t seem to live up to its traditional appeal for silvers.
Harder-to-cast flies like the cone-headed Dolly Llama didn’t produce as well as a variety of smaller lead-eye flies and leeches.
All the flies caught fish, although the salmon and rainbows could be temperamental at times, balking at everything we presented.
Once, I had to assure Moershel that he wasn’t hurting my feelings as he caught six silvers in a stretch to my zero.
I had to laugh at myself again that day as I released a gorgeous, pink-spotted, 24-inch, hard-fighting Dolly while thinking, “Thank you; that was nice, but you’re not the fish I’m after.”
I was spoiled in Alaska.